Nonprofit organizations often undergo an evolution. They add services, expand their reach and serve more diverse audiences. Along with growth often comes the desire to change the organization’s name to reflect these changes.
We have been asked by many nonprofits to provide strategic counsel about the pros and cons of undergoing a name change. While the results vary, there is one constant: changing the name of a company or organization never should be done impulsively or taken lightly.
The first issue we consider is what will happen to all the people who know the agency by its former name? Will they recognize the new name and continue to lend support personal loans for bad credit? Certainly the first thing to be done is inform all supporters of the change, but will they remember? It takes decades to brand an organization so people know the name. All of a sudden changing it risks throwing current and future supporters a curve ball, as now they have to know you as something else.
The next issue is to examine what there is to be gained by changing the name . Is it to make the staff feel better about their work? Is it to project a larger presence? Perhaps. But we submit that if changing the name of an organization will not strategically grow it, then it probably is a bad idea.
We had a client with the word “Children’s” in its name. This organization had been functioning successfully for 50 years. However, they expanded their mission to include adults. So would changing the name help grow the organization because it was seeking funding for adult services, or would it hurt because it had a core of donors who gave because they wanted to help children?
It was a tough decision, and one that consumed dozens of hours of meetings, strategy sessions and surveys. In the end, it was our recommendation that after all these years, more harm than good would come by changing the name. And they didn’t.
Our solution was to alter the tagline. A tagline is a commonly used device to describe the work of an organization or company with a few words. We’ve all seen it. “Good to the Last Drop” as Maxwell House Coffee has said seemingly forever.
Taglines are commonly used to more fully explain the mission of an organization or a for-profit company. Changing a tagline is usually easy and can be very effective in describing changes in the direction of an organization. It is also very easy to do because it usually doesn’t require changing graphics, or if it does, it follows the design of the original logo.
So if your organization is considering changing it’s name, think first about changing your tagline and see if that does the trick. It will save you lots of work, worry and possible loss of support.