Branding should be an important element of any organisation.  No organisation is too small to promote themselves professionally.  Sure the community and the volunteer sector i.e. the 3rd sector is not the same as the commercial sector and most people are attracted by our values and not our corporate looks, but that does not mean we should not make a good impression.  

Branding can be attached to high budget and expensive marketing , but in this wave of social media and inter-connectivity all of this is done away.  There are many examples of small start-ups that have bootstrapped and made massive successes by making sure the branding and marketing is sound.  

I am currently using 5 volunteers to build a brand, the initial stages are focusing on Twitter and Facebook.  Within about 30 days each one of those facebook accounts will have approx’ 2000 friends each and the target for the Twitter account is 10,000 followers.  Each and everyone of these followers are selected from the demograpic’s of the target niche, it is very much so about quantity but quality is essential. 

For your marketing material it is the logo that defines your brand and it is your logo that people people will catch as they glance by for the 3 seconds of concentration that they give to any material before they make the decision to stop and look!

Anna who runs the T3SC health network designed 3 logo’s herself and sent them out to one of her networks to see which one they like the most, one of them came down as a hands on winner; but this simple method of asking your network, tribe, followers, client, or whatever you want to call them to vote is an effective method to get them to connect with your brand.

Here is a strategy that you can apply that not only gets you a logo design at a cost effective price but will also strenghten your brand to those who matter most to your organisation and potentially develop an increase to more loyal followers.  

99designs.com is a design service with a twist. 99designs gathers graphic designers and web designers to this one platform and they enter into a contest.  These contests basically ask designers to submit their work in response to specifications given by companies or individuals. These companies then award prizes to the winner. Those who want designs but have limited budgets could get great work to suit their budget requirements.  

The advantage you have is that you are a not for profit organisation and that in these contests you will receive at least 3-4 designs. 

You should take advantage of your situation.  

Express that this is for a not for profit organisation and that is why you have a tight budget {I suggest $100/£50} and the selected winner will receive credentials on the website and a link to their portfolio.  On average when a contest is approx’ $200 it can get results of 4/5 logo’s but since you may be on a tight budget you would express that you are a not for profit org’ and appeal to peoples good nature.  

Once you have got a selection of logo designs redirect your co-workers, clients, followers, etc to this page to make a vote for one of these.  Get onto facebook, twitter and other social networks to get others to vote.  In fact find the websites and bloggers that are in the same niche and send them an email or a comment about voting on a logo, having bloggers championing your cause can do wonders to get more exposure for your org’.

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I do not need to dwell on the importance of a web presence for your community or voluntary organisations. 

A few months back I supported Hannah in delivering a session on creating a web presence for community groups using Google pages.  It was a successful day and several groups created their first websites.  

During the session I was asked how to go about registering a domain name,  I gave a few links to follow and how to register. 

I want to extend an offer to community and voluntary groups to register a .co.uk domain name for FREE* and you can register as many domains as you want to every 24hrs,  not that you will need to register many but it sometimes helps to have a selection.

To do this simply subscribe to the RSS feed and when you receive an update of a new post to this blog there will be a link that will provide all the information on how to register your domain.

Alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed and then drop me an email to:

contact@socioclick.com

I will respond ASAP with all the information you need.

*Subject to availability.

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Photo by Kamshots

A lot of charities or volunteer organisations are stuck with using tools that are provided with Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office.   Artwork and designs are created in publisher or using the selection from clip art.

Sure if you got Office 2007 there are a lot of funky stuff made available, but nothing beats captivating human images to draw your audience in.

On the website front many volunteer groups are either using there own photos or pictures uploaded to the site or just avoid using them.

Just a thought! maybe in a future session I will bring in a graphic designer as a guest writer to give some tips of what makes a great poster.

Here is the part were a fusion of creative commons and flickr photos come to effect.

First lets have a brief paragraph of flickr:

“ Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. As of November 2008^[update], it claims to host more than 3 billion images.^{” {source: wikipedia}}

Now we know that flickr has billions of photos for you to look at in your free time.  But did you know that you can also use those photos?

Here is where creative commons comes into affect:

First a brief of creative commons:

“Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.^[1] The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators.^{” {source: wikipedia}}

Here is a link to a nice comic book explanation.

By going to flickr’s creative common area you are provided with a number of the photos that are available in the different creative common attributions.

Attributions used in flickr are explained in the video tutorial below:

Clicking on the ’see more’ link for any given attribute will provide you with a search box.  Now found the picture type you want to use.

The picture used in this post at the top is found after doing a search for ‘family’ and I have attributed it with a link to the original source.

The butterscotch video collection has 10 how to style video tutorials for flickr here use this to give you better insight to flickr and how you can find what you are looking to.

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