- 1. Win over the sceptics
- 2. Use multiple channels of internal communication and roll out the new brand face-to-face with workshops or presentations.
- 3. Ensure your senior management team are visibly involved
- 4. Create inspiring values that are easy to remember
- 5. Make sure staff and volunteers can sum up your charity on the spot
- 6. Bring your brand to life
- 7. Recruit Brand Champions and set up a Brand Steering Group
- 8. Give staff and partners tools to manage the brand and protect your Intellectual Property in contract
- 9. Make sure staff behaviour and customer service matter
- 10. Create an effective creative briefing process and monitor your brand at regular intervals
9. Make sure staff behaviour and customer service matter.
Every single contact you have with an organisation helps to form your perception and understanding of it. If you have a good experience in a shop as a customer, you will associate good service with that company – it will, for you, become part of the brand. A company will seek to make sure that through a consistent communications and good service it reinforces the kind of image it wants its customers to have.
Staff behaviour and customer service are crucial to perceptions of a brand and should not be taken for granted. Every interaction someone has with your charity will impact on how they feel about you. It will affect whether they want to be involved with you or not: whether to work for you, to lobby for you, to ask you for help, or to be part of anything you do.
Internal communications (in print and face to face) concerning the brand should highlight the impact of staff behaviour and the importance of professionalism and customer service. This could be built into the workshops developed to support the launch of the brand and should also be covered in staff inductions. The importance of interpersonal communication can be illustrated using ‘Moments of truth’. ‘Moments of truth’ are the occasions or episodes when people decide whether to support a particular charity.