The "Power Tool" of Branding

OK, the jury is in. Community outreach has now been deemed one of the most powerful ways to brand and promote your program and your services. Developing relationships with organizations in your community will not only help create customer affinity but gets people to start promoting your business for you!

But the secret is not that you do outreach, but HOW you do it.

I’ve learned many lessons over the years in my marketing career, but one of the fundamental truths I’ve experienced is that you need to do outreach with the community on their terms.

Whoa, this is different you say. Why not just invite community leaders to your place, send out a nicely designed invite, and do a show-and-tell. Give them a tour, invite your executives to present and…Voila…Community outreach accomplished.

NOT! This is outreach strictly on your company’s terms. Here is a better approach:

Step 1: Create your list of organizations or communities you want to target

Step 2: Set up a personal one-on-one meeting with a leader in these organizations or communities

Step 3: Listen and ASK THEM, “what is the preferred way to connect with their members and customers, as they  serve as the entry point to reach these individuals and families.

Step 4: Be prepared for a very different approach. This may include:

• Being a part of one of their forums, by utilizing their local meeting venues and forums. Don’t expect people to come to you.
• Using community leaders as facilitators–or let them make the introductions. Their endorsement is critical.
• Ensuring presentations are made by staff who are members of the community or with ties to it. Not necessarily your leadership team.
• Practicing cultural competency. Understand the values of the community and honor them. For example, with Latino communities, don’t be Anglo time driven, rather serve food first, allow people to socialize and when there is a lull, begin the meeting.
• Being showcased not in a forum, but via a word-of-mouth referral by leaders.
• Creating mini-articles for their community publications, and then being open to placing an ad, usually at a nominal amount.
• Following up with leaders one-on-one throughout the year. Don’t forget them after you do your initial outreach engagement. Otherwise you won’t be considered sincere.
• Supporting their local causes and fundraising events. Your presence and participation shows you are committed–not just throwing money at them.
• Including your own family in community activities. This humanizes the company and puts a face on it.

Outreach is all about branding and extending your own community to others, who may look and act differently with contrasting values and styles. These  organizations and individuals can be powerful advocates and evangelists  and create word of mouth goodwill….if you show respect and meet them where they are, on their terms.

To get our book, "25 Building Blocks To Create a Conscientious Organization" FREE, go to HCollaborative.com for an instant download.

The Dangers of Status Quo: How Organizations Become Extinct

If you worked in ad agencies during your career (as I have), you quickly learn about being different.

Building a brand, developing a strategy, creating an ad is ALWAYS about differentiating.

Doing things as usual is almost never a good idea.

So why is it we see so many businesses and organizations not clearly setting themselves apart in the "how" or "why" they do what they do?

I think it can be summed up in two words: comfort zone.

We all love our comfort zones.  We feel safe, confident, and it's easy to lead when we can fall back into the familiar.

Going out and exploring the unknown is scary. It's not a predictable investment of your time or money.

Yet, today with a global economy, an internet driven world of social media being increasingly led by Gen Xers and Milliennials, classic business thinking may no longer be a sacred cow. 

Organizations, at their very core, change rapidly. You see it every day as new models make old businesses extinct.

Think Uber, Airbnb and Netflix.

So how is that so many organizations and their leaders continue to practice the status quo? More importantly, how do you recognize the "trappings" of favoring such thinking?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you find yourself becoming more defensive than usual  when staff suggest new ideas?
• Do you find yourself taking more "air time" at meetings and sharing the merits of your own ideas?
• Do you find yourself retreating into policies and procedures when a different opinion is expressed?
• Is your open door policy becoming more closed door as you retreat?

If you answer yes to any of these, you definitely need to rethink things.

To get you started, here are 5 tips from Stillettos on the Glass Ceiling, a site whose mission is to unite, empower and support women. 

1.  Learn to Ask Good Questions:  Asking the right questions can lead to eye-opening insights that are right there waiting to be found but that no one has taken the time to find out.

2.  Embrace Golden Silence: After you’ve asked a question and the person responding pauses in their answer, don’t jump right in with your next question. Give the person space to add more

3.  Check Your Assumptions at the Door: Assumptions can be some of the most detrimental thoughts we have because they limit our potential for growth and change.                                                                            

 4.  Shift Your Perspective: Like with assumptions, if we never change our perspective we will never grow. Building a project team with different and unique perspectives is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this. Just make sure to give all the people on the team a chance to voice their thoughts and insights.                                                                   

5.  Be Firm, but Don’t Be Antagonistic: Driving change with any group of people can be difficult. It is sometimes easier to give in to someone with a vice grip on the past than it is to deal with the pain of change. Many people fear change will lead to a loss of a job. Be firm about the need to move forward and how it will reap more rewards in the long run.

Today's successful organizations never got there by maintaining the status quo. Their leaders recognized that doing things differently whether it is a business cause or social cause was essential.

And if anything should remain the same, it should be that kind of thinking.

To get our book, "25 Building Blocks To Create a Conscientious Organization" FREE, go to HCollaborative.com for an instant download.

Does Your Organization Attract Tourists, or People Who Want To Stay and Visit?

For Mother’s Day, I flew down to visit my son in San  Francisco.  He shares an apartment with his buddy in North Beach and given my Italian heritage, it’s a place that feels like coming home.  It’s an authentic neighborhood, with café shops and Italian bakeries, where I heard Italian spoken among the local residents. At every corner, the Italian flag, tri-colors of green, white and red, are  prominently striped on the utility poles, letting me know in a simple way that I was in a special place.

In  the  piazza next to St. Peter and Paul’s Cathedral , I watched elderly Italian men gesturing with their hands as they watched the community wake up, this Sunday morning.   A small group of elderly Chinese residents practiced Tai Chi.  It was real and I felt a part of the community.  I stopped with my cappuccino in hand and lingered, wanting to participate in the vitality of the neighborhood.

A little later, I continued my walk down to Fisherman’s wharf, only about 8 blocks away.  I was overwhelmed with tourists—and I felt no connection.  People with cameras, accompanied by bored children, browsed the shops and waited in line for the ferry to take them to Sausalito or Alcatraz.  Unlike my early morning adventure in North Beach, these people were tourists… sampling the sights but not stopping long enough to experience the sense of place- an historic fishing market. In fact, there was nothingto truly make them pause, dig deeper and enjoy and relish the waterfront legacy and story.

And I thought about how often as organizations we attract “tourists” to our website , who may engage briefly with us, drawn to our “brightness”, but then they move on, without connecting   to our core story.    We lose an opportunity to engage with them because we do not present ourselves in a simple and authentic way that resonates with a pure purpose .  Rather like Fisherman’s Wharf, we draw them with a multitude of sensations, sights, smells, bright lights and noises, that give us a brief look, but then we are on to the next shiny thing.    Simply stated, we inundate our stakeholders with too much information, overwhelming them with words, program descriptions, dull imagery that are not clean and simple, but rather complex and confusing.

So today, let’s try to be simple and clean with our branding and messaging.  Let’s try to be authenitic and real and create a sense of place and story like that of North Beach.  Let’s create engagement and connection following these two principles:

1.       Shareahistory that creates curiosity, interest and the desire to learn more

2.     Ensure every touchpoint with the organization, from an interaction with a staff member, to a press release about the company, creates a singular and differentiating message and sense of place about WHO you are and WHERE you came from.

And of course as we mention frequently in our blogs:

1.       Eliminate unnecessary words from  your  website and collateral

2.       Create a manifesto that states the truth about your purpose

3.       Clean up collateral, with consistency of brand that makes it simple to connect