I enjoy reading Jeff Brooks' thoughts about how nonprofits work and how they talk about themselves; he's good at questioning assumptions. For instance: this blog post on branding. Everyone knows that strong brands are supposed to attract attention, build loyalty and give an instant sense of what an organization is about. But they can also shut you in, says Brooks.

Your brand is what you do and who you are. What you look like is the smallest part of that. Most branding guidebooks pay lip-service to this fact, but none of them do anything about it. And that’s no surprise, because they can’t. A brand is bigger than a set of rules you can put down in a spiral-bound book.

If you have a great brand—one that aligns with the beliefs, hopes, and self-image of your donors—you can laugh at the puny efforts of the brand police to achieve consistency.

Brooks is right of course. An organization that is slavishly consistent to a narrow set of branding rules will come off as pretty boring and one-dimensional. I'll bet this fact has something to do with why corporate advertising has gotten a kick in the pants toward zany in the past few years -- consumers got tired of brands devoid of anything real or surprising.

This is not a problem we've encountered very often among clients with whom we've worked -- many nonprofits are probably short on brand definition. But I'm sure it's an issue for some. For a follow-up, I hope Brooks will give us an example.