I thought I’d kick off Unpacked this month with a little exercise to help you determine how synchronized your brand communications are. First: how many people in your organization represented your brand this week? Did your development coordinator write any grant proposals? Did your executive director approve website copy? Did your volunteer coordinator craft recruitment emails? Did your newest hire generate social posts? Did a team member or independent contractor prompt ChatGPT to help them draft a newsletter, appeal letter or event description?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, we need to talk, because every single one of those touchpoints shapes how your community perceives your brand. If everyone’s on the same page, then congratulations. You can stop reading. But if everyone is personally interpreting your brand’s meaning, tone and look, as if brand communications were a choose-your-own-adventure game where everyone arrives at a different destination, then you need to consider why.
I’ve seen organizations spend months developing and fine-tuning a brand strategy—clarifying their purpose, articulating their values, defining their positioning —then distilling all that deep research and thinking into a PDF that three people in the organization wind up reading once. Then the team wonders why their brand “isn't landing” or their communications “feel off.” But how could it be otherwise when the people charged with communicating the brand story lack a tool that serves as their north star when they’re unsure what to say and how to say it.
“When everyone interprets your brand differently, your brand stands for nothing.”
That missing tool are your brand standards. Think of them as the distillation of all your brand decisions. They function as the bridge between your brand story and the various associated elements that define its tone, its visual style, and determine the various daily messaging choices your team makes. They serve as reference point for everyone who communicates about your brand and speak in one unifying voice about everything it’s important to know about it: here’s how we talk, here’s how we look, here’s how we sound, here’s how we make decisions when we’re unsure.
Any time someone has to write an email, design a flyer or respond to a comment, and is flummoxed about how to proceed, they should be able to turn to your brand standards for the answers they need. Ideally, I recommend digitizing them, so they’re accessible to everyone who touches your communications, from a team member to a part-time contractor, and easy to update as your brand evolves.
Choose-your-own-adventure brand messaging certainly isn’t a new problem. Purpose-driven organizations have always operated with lean teams and members who wear multiple hats. But over the past decade, I’ve watched the problem intensify. What’s changed is the speed and volume of communication required to stay visible, coupled with the widespread use of AI tools capable of generating endless content.
Which brings me to my next series of questions: what AI-powered tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Canva) did the people who touched your brand communications use last week, and how often did they use them? How many times did the person employing those tools make a judgment call about your brand’s tone, language, or visual presentation? How many of those decisions aligned with the brand you think you’re building?
See, the thing about these miraculous new time-saving AI tools is that the content they can generate in nanoseconds is only as accurate and nuanced as the human direction they receive. ChatGPT isn’t familiar with your brand. It only knows what you tell it. The more specifically you direct it, the more the fundraising appeal you asked it to draft will reflect your brand’s true personality.
“How often does someone who touches your brand communications make judgment calls about tone, language or visual representation that don’t align with the brand you think you’re building?”
The rise of AI makes the need for specificity even more pressing. When you use AI tools to help generate content, you're essentially training an AI-powered intern who will do exactly what you tell it to do—nothing more, nothing less. Like all great interns, it’s highly productive, but it also needs direction, supervision, and quality control. If your prompt says, ‘write a fundraising appeal’, you'll get a fundraising appeal. But will it sound like your fundraising appeal? Will it reflect your values? Will it employ the style and tone of writing that signal what’s unique about you, and avoid the language you've rejected?
If your donor newsletter is formal and institutional in tone, but your social media is casual and playful, how will your audience know who you are? And if you don’t know the correct tone, how will ChatGPT? If you send donors a tonally off-key newsletter, they’ll wonder who you are, what you stand for, and why it’s their job to figure that out. And once donors are left scratching their heads, you’ve lost them. When your website talks about “centring community voices” but your impact report is written in passive, jargon-heavy language, the disconnect is palpable. These inconsistencies might seem minor, but they add up to a larger question in people's minds: Who are you really?
What makes brand standards so crucial and effective comes down to their specificity. Instructing your content creators or contributors to “be authentic” is meaningless. Authenticity, after all, is in the eye and mind of the beholder. If, however, you say, “We want our content to sound as if we’re talking to a colleague over coffee, not presenting to a boardroom” and “we use contractions”, and “we lead with stories before statistics”, and “we refer to community members, not clients”, you’re much likelier to wind up with content that’s consistently on brand. And think about this: if you can't articulate your brand clearly enough to guide your AI intern, what chance does your human team have to get it right?
“Instructing your content creators to 'be authentic' is meaningless. What makes brand standards so crucial comes down to their specificity.”
If, however, you invest in developing brand standards, you can literally feed your brand voice guidelines, key messages, and tone examples into your AI prompts. You can tell your AI intern, “avoid these phrases” and “prioritize these values”. Suddenly, the first draft it spits out isn’t just coherent and grammatically correct—it actually sounds like the voice of your organization.
If you work with part-time and fractional team members, the necessity of addressing this issue compounds. The volunteer social media coordinator who works 10 hours a week doesn't have the same organizational memory as your founding team. They're coming in fresh, trying to intuit what you want based on limited context. And yet we expect all of them to somehow just get it. And when someone joins your team for 15 hours a week, you don't have time for extensive cultural onboarding.
“If you send donors a tonally off-key newsletter, they’ll wonder who you are, and why it’s their job to figure that out. Once donors are left scratching their heads, you’ve lost them.”
Brand standards become the institutional memory that makes these relationships functional and keeps everything running on time. In a world where everyone’s expected to be a writer and communicator, where AI is increasingly an integral part of the content creation process, and where part-time and fractional team members are the norm rather than the exception, developing comprehensive brand standards is an investment in your team’s effectiveness and organization’s credibility.
Mission-driven organizations are much more vulnerable on this issue than commercial brands because they’re selling a purpose as well as a product or service. It’s that purpose that draws volunteers and donors, the reason they invest their time and money, and trust in your vision for change. They need to believe that you know who you are and where you’re headed. If your brand communication is confusing or inconsistent, it will undermine your credibility and, eventually, their belief in you.
But rigorously defined brand standards aren't just about consistency for the sake of consistency. They're also about trust. Think about the organizations you trust most. You trust them because you know what to expect. Their emails sound like their website, which sounds like their social media, which jibes with the way their staff talk about their work. At the end of the day, unified, consistent messaging across the board builds confidence, brand recognition, and makes it easier for people to understand you, remember you, and decide to support you.
And that’s really the whole ballgame, isn’t it?
