Survey your stakeholders

You may already know that you need a rebrand, but it’s much easier to get agreement if you have research to back up your thoughts.

It’s a good idea to survey a wide range of stakeholders to get a fair and unbiased outcome. Stakeholders typically include the following people within and around a charity:

• Internal
  • Trustees
  • Management teams
  • Employees
  • Fundraisers
  • External
    • General Public locally and nationally (potential supporters)
    • Existing supporters
    • Beneficiaries (people you help)
    • Family and friends of beneficiaries
    • Media
      • Members of the local press
      • Members of international press
      • Member of industry press

Questionnaires/Surveys

It doesn’t need to be a hugely complex survey, but it should cover the main supporting reasons for your rebrand initiative. For example, if you feel that your brand is dated, ask people if they feel it is too. If you don’t think your brand represents what you do, simply ask someone who doesn’t know your charity what they think it does just from the brand alone.

The benefit of a questionnaire is that it is largely anonymous (if necessary) and isn’t time specific (people can complete it at their leisure). The down sides can be that you don’t fully understand the responses, and that people can sometimes misunderstand a question and don’t see clarification.

Focus Groups and Workshops

If you’re looking for quick results a focus group or workshop session with stakeholders might be right for you. However, arranging a date that everyone can do can be tricky, and the session requires someone who can confidently be the chair person, pushing their way through the agenda and keeping everyone on track and relevant.

The benefit of a focus group or workshop is that you get lots of wonderful qualitative information full of opinions and hopefully some great ideas. The downside can be that people get over-excited or on the other extreme some conflict can arise. Either way, you need to be strong enough to focus the group.

Present your ideas based on facts

Using the results from your survey you can deliver clear reasons and rationale for any rebranding decisions that you make.

When you come to present your ideas, make sure that contentious issues are highlighted well in advance and that you have a answer to any questions in this area.

Present design visuals after your rationale

A common mistake made when presenting design visuals is to show the visual before explaining the rationale. Opinion of design can be horribly subjective, but a good design, with good rationale is actually quite objective when presented correctly.

Present predicted ROI, but don’t guarantee it!

You may have an example of a charity that rebranded and saw donations soar as a result of that rebrand. Chances are it isn’t that clear cut, but good example can help to support your rebrand ideas.

If you’re rebranding for a specific purpose (like in our previous blog entry on reasons for charity rebrands which covered rebranding to reflect a wider audience range or change in vision) then making this clear through your brand could definitely have an impact on your donations and supporter numbers.

How Oyster can help

Oyster works with charities to guide them through the complete rebrand process, from surveying and influencing stakeholders, through the creative design process, to launching your new brand to the world.

Get in touch with Oyster to find out how we can help your charity to take the next step.

Our next Charity Rebrand post will cover ‘creating a new charity brand. Watch this space…

An opportunity to take a really good look at your marketing strategy with our full day marketing workout. Your input, ideas, and reflection drive the session, while we keep the process flowing by employing structured models and exercises, and providing our input and experience when you feel you need it. The marketing workshop is run by one of our directors, who is an experienced NLP facilitator.

How is it structured?

Ideally, one or two people from your organisation act as ‘sponsors’. The sponsor should ideally be directly involved with your marketing strategy. It is their job to agree clear goals for the day with us, and to take ownership of the final outcomes.

We structure the process to bring out ideas, air concerns, identify needs, explore modern marketing techniques, consider existing and potential supporters and open up the arena. Together we build ideas, set actions, pose questions and explore options.

At the end, you will have thoroughly reviewed what you do and how you do it, explored new options, asked poignant questions, considered various approaches to marketing strategy and received input from Oyster.

We then feed back the outcomes to you as a working plan with agreed and allocated actions and timescales – an enlightening place to arrive!

What does Oyster add?

Oyster is a modern marketing and design agency located on the Hampshire, West Sussex border just an hour from London. We specialise in marketing strategy. Our clients include Save the Children, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Tall Ships and General Electric.

We bring our experience to the table but we aren’t looking to lecture – you know your business! Our job is to structure the workout so you keep moving forward, and to offer our experience where it helps.

If you would like to consider a marketing workout simply email hello@oysterdesign.co.uk or call us on 01243 389713. We look forward to speaking with you soon.

Why do charities rebrand?

A charity’s reason for rebranding can vary, and in this blog entry we’re going to look at some of these reasons. This entry is the first of 4 entries covering our findings and experience of charity rebranding.

Oyster has been speaking with several charities recently about their potential or planned rebrand and the reasons for their decision.  A charity rebrand seems to be triggered by the following key events or changes:

Change of purpose, focus or beneficiary

For example, the range of people that the charity helps may have widened or the charity mission may have changed to the degree that the existing brand no longer reflects it accurately.

Modernisation

Design has trends, and time can take a heavy toll on a brand. Sometimes the brand design just needs a refresh, but occasionally a total rebrand is called for to help the charity to achieve its goals or appeal to the new generation.

Going national

Some charities that we’ve heard from recently feel that they are seen as a locally based charity, when in fact this isn’t the case. Here charities rebrand to attract a wider level of support and also to help people who might need their services further afield to find them.

Competing charities

Sometimes the amount of charities serving a particular cause can grow. This can be due to demand for specific support increasing, the cause receiving increased press coverage or an event occurring, which requires greater support than is currently available from charities. In this instance a charity may rebrand in order to ‘compete’ with the new charities.

Examples of Charity Rebrand Rationale

There are some great examples of charity rebrands around which may give you some inspiration or guidance.

Here are a few that we’ve found

St. Dunstands > Blind Veterans UK

Process: Renaming and Rebrand

Why they chose to rebrand:

“We knew St Dunstan’s was not a well-known brand and did not explain who our target audience was or what we did,” says Andrew Jones, the charity’s director of fundraising and communications. “We needed to attract more beneficiaries, so we have gone for a clearer, more obvious name.”

http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/news/1122642/Brand-report-St-Dunstans/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

SOVA (Supporting Others Through Voluntary Action)

Process: Rebrand

Why they chose to rebrand:

Director of PR, communications and marketing, Darshana Dholakia said: “Like many organisations, the changes in funding structures have made us look more closely at our position in the market, who we are and how we talk to people about what we do.”

http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/12035/charity_rebrands_to_become_more_competitive

Macmillan Cancer Support

Process: Rebrand

Why they chose to rebrand:

“Macmillan Cancer Support used to be best known for Macmillan nurses – providing an invaluable service to people with cancer, but often misperceived as ‘angels of death’. With 2 million people in the UK living with cancer and that number growing every day, Macmillan needed to embrace a much broader role – a source of support for anyone affected by cancer and a force for change in cancer care.” (written by Rebranding Agency).

http://wolffolins.com/work/macmillan-cancer-support

How Oyster can help

Oyster works with charities to guide them through the complete rebrand process, from surveying and influencing stakeholders, through the creative design process, to launching your new brand to the world.

Get in touch with Oyster to find out how we can help your charity to take the next step. Call 01243 589713, or email hello@oysterdesign.co.uk.

Read more about charity rebranding.

Our next ‘Charity Branding’ posts

Charity Rebrands

• Gaining support through involvement
• Designing the new brand
• Launching your new brand to the world

Coming Soon. Watch this space…

Gamification is about involving your audience by engaging them in a challenge, competition, test or some other competitive activity either with themselves or others. We all understand that making your website content as ‘sticky’ as possible is key in attracting and keeping site visitors, and gamificaiton is a tactic that might work in increasing your site stickiness. The challenges don’t have to be physical or competitive, they just need to reward the visitor for staying engaged. Here are some examples of large companies who employ gamification:

LinkedIn Profile Completeness

When you sign up for LinkedIn you are continuously ‘challenged’ to complete your profile. The site shows profile percentage completeness and gives suggestions of what you should do next to complete it. This encourages the users to do more and become more involved, but the reward is simply having a complete profile.

Generic Coffee Chain Reward Cards

When you first buy a cup of coffee, you get a card that gets stamped for each further coffee that you buy. If you complete the card, you get a coffee for free. The idea is to drive loyalty, where the coffee stamps are an incentive to keep using the same chain over another. The game is the challenge to complete a card.

Ideas for your website

Competitions – ask your visitors to enter a competition to win something desirable in exchange for their email and contact details.

Multiple purchase incentive – if your into e-commerce, offer incentives for the more products that people buy. Incentives should be based on the number of purchases made and should get better as the number of purchases increase.

Forum websites – allow your contributors to progress in user type based on the level of their contribution – for example someone who posts 1-10 entries might be called a ‘newbie’, and someone who posts 50+ times may be a ‘master’ or something similar.

Social media challenges – ask people to send picture via social media or them with your product or using your service. Re-post the best ones or put them on your website for comment. For some people, just being involved is enough of a reward or incentive.

Reward for feedback – ask your website visitors to feedback on your products or services, or even just on your website. Offer some kind of incentive for their participation, like a free consultation or post their example as a case study giving them web coverage.

Elite customers – invite your customers to be come part of an elite group that you involve in product/service decisions and deliver news to first. It might in fact be open to everyone, but being ‘special’ in some way and be a great reward.

Why use gamification?

Gamification makes people stay longer and gets them to come back time and time again. The more that people are exposed to your brand, the more they will remember you. The more they remember your brand, the more likely they are to work with you/buy from you!

Oyster build sticky websites that use gamification (amongst other techniques) to increase your return on investment in web. We don’t just build a website and hand it over – we are involved in the whole process helping you to identify opportunities and present your content in a way that is most like to deliver enquiries online. To talk to Oyster about web, please call us on 01243 589713 or email hello@oysterdesign.co.uk.

Web

The web consistently delivers the most effective return on investment. Beware simply spending money on design, in order to get the most from your investment you must address your messaging, understand your audiences and provide clear ways for them to engage with you. Another area to watch out for it choosing your CMS (content management system). If possible, go for an ‘open-source’ CMS that doesn’t require on-going license fees and where you own all the code and software – no-one else. Read more about web design…

Email Marketing

Email marketing is cheap to do and effective when done well. Legalities aside, the key areas to get right are your choice of data, your messaging, being targeted and relevant, and the design of your email. Using a solid email broadcast system is a very good idea, this way you can see who opening and clicking in your email which allows you to better target your customers and also monitor the performance of your emails and make changes where necessary.  Read more about email marketing…

Cross-sell to existing customers

If you’re a business that sells multiple products, it’s likely that your customers may be interested products other than those they normally buy. Businesses are notoriously bad at this due to different departments not talking and lack of sales initiative, but a warm bed is far easier to get into than a cold one! Changing your marketing materials to include cross-sell opportunities, or sending email newsletters to your existing customer base about your entire rage of products is a very good idea.

Look more professional

Whether it’s print or digital, how your company looks says at lot to potential and existing customers – whether it’s and accurate reflection or not! Good graphic design can change a company’s image from ‘run of the mill’ to ‘different from the rest’. Stand out from the crowd! Oyster know how to use design to highlight key messages and elements and how to inspire the audience to get in touch. See examples of our work.

If you’re budgeting for some marketing spend this year, why not ask Oyster to quote for the most competitive and effective way to utilise your budget? What have you got to lose? Call Oyster on 01243 389713 or email hello@oysterdesign.co.uk.

Less is more

Information overload is easy to achieve but difficult to digest. The best annual reports select the most important statistics and facts to focus on and then use design and graphics to highlight them.

Call to action

Yes it’s a report, but it’s still a fundraising tool! We think it is important to include a strong message throughout and at the end of the report, and make it very clear what you want them to do.

The mobile market

There has been an 81% growth in mobile web readership, with 16% of emails now read on devices, 36% at a desktop and 48% via webmail (returnpath. net). Oyster can help you to ensure that your document is accessible to all.

A good mix of facts and images

Were possible its a great idea to include something like a ‘this year at a glance’ page to highlight key achievements over the past year in a bite-size way. You may also want to organise a photo shoot (Oyster can help!) of your service users to communicate in pictures the valuable work you do, coupled with powerful quotes. This can reduce the need for so much text and detail too.

Charity Commission Guidelines

We like to ensure all the basics are there by checking with the reporting requirements: The Commission’s guidance on Charity Reporting and Accounting essentials (CC15 a).

How many of these brands do you recognise?

Hover to reveal the answer…

What if someone recognised your organisation in the same way?

That’s what a brand can do for you.

A BRAND can…

• Create instant recognition
• Increase credibility
• Generate a following
• Make your business tangible in your customer’s lives
• Increase loyalty

To discuss your brand with Oyster call 01243 789713 or email hello@oysterdesign.co.uk.

Not so many years ago 1 in 3 people referred to a website when making a decision about products or services, now 3 out of 4 do. School websites are more than just a presence online or a portal for information, they are your shop window, where prospective and current parents will form opinions about your school.

Learning platforms were all the rage for schools five years ago, they allowed schools to transfer a lot of their admin online and also address communication policies with parents. However many learning platforms are very rigid and functional in their design, constraining the school’s ability to display their true personality and character online. Custom school websites are now more popular than ever as prices have dropped for good content managed websites and the pressure on schools to go with learning platforms has decreased with cuts on funding.

Important things to consider when planning your school website are:

Personality and Character

Does your school website say the right things about your school’s character, vision and priorities? Design, photography, use of colour and type are all key in making the right impression.

Photography

Images are so important, and a really effective way to show what life might be like attending your school. Photographs allow prospective students to visualise themselves at your school, and incite interest to arrange a visit.

Event diary

The school calendar is so important for parents. Oyster build school calendar tools that allow parents to easily search through events and even register to attend them online. They can even pay for school trips online, making school finance departments easier to manage.

Create the right IT impression

IT is going to be a huge part of every child’s future and parents like to know that their children are being given the right start in this area. Increasingly people expect more of their online experience and it’s important that you’re seen to be delivering this as an educational establishment. Children are incredibly adept at using computers and the Internet – show that you can support that.

Encourage communication

A great school website enables easy lines of communication between the teaching team and parents. Oyster has some innovative ways to ensure this is promoted.

Display work

Students love to see their work displayed online, and prospective parents love to see that their work is appreciated! Add a child’s artwork to your homepage, run a competition online or as parents to vote for the winner in an online poll. The possibilities are endless!

What’s next?

If your school is looking for a school website, why not as Oyster to provide a proposal and estimate of costs? You can read more about our marketing services for schools on our website. Please get in touch to discuss your options and to get a quote. We hope to hear from you soon!

Not always the easiest of subjects, Oyster approached the design of the website with an aim to avoiding any stereotypes and preconceptions. The Oyster designers delivered a stylish and professional design, that was in keeping with the existing brand identity at A.H. Freemantle and their traditional style.

Oyster also delivered photography for this project.  Freemantle wanted to avoid the stereotypical images that you might associate with funeral direction – flowers, cemeteries etc, which gave our photographer a little more creativity to work with. The style and format of the website meant that mostly landscape images were needed to fit the site layout.

The Freemantle website is fully content managed, enabling the team to login and make changes to text and images whenever they need to. Oyster also built an obituaries section where Freemantle can upload details when they need to. Visitors can also add obituaries, which Freemantle can approve and make live on the website.

You can see the new A.H. Freemantle website here: http://www.ahfreemantle.co.uk

VASD’s old website didn’t present the charity’s great services very effectively and the site couldn’t be edited easily by the team. Oyster delivered a fully content managed website that is easy to navigate and is more in reflective of the services that the charity offers. The charity also produced new images and details of the properties that the charity offered for rent, which are now displayed in a clear and attractive way.

The VASD team can also now easily log into the site to make changes as and when required, including editing the homepage banner, site text and any images.

Visit the site here: http://vasd.org.uk/