Brian Kurklin, Senior Graphic Designer
Cultivating your PAC’s brand is a crucial component of reaching donors and strengthening your unique narrative. Branding is more than a logo or a color palette, but rather a holistic approach to the look, feel, and voice of the organization you represent. From emails and websites to collateral and promotional materials, all the touchpoints your organization puts forward coalesce into the brand that your audiences perceive.
The story you tell is vitally important to the goals your PAC hopes to achieve. Understanding how your brand serves to tell that story gives you the leverage you need to craft compelling messages. Here are 4 things you should consider when building your PAC brand:
Integration. Determining how closely your PAC integrates within the larger organization is crucial for developing your program’s brand. Does the larger organization want to be associated with the PAC or do you need to create some distance in the messaging? How do the goals of the PAC reflect the larger goals of the organization? How does the PAC focus on how those goals align?
These kinds of questions help determine the narrative which you want to communicate through your branding. If the PAC works closely with the company or association, sticking to the brand elements of the larger organization can make a lot of sense. However, if the organization wants to keep the PAC at arm’s length, incorporating additional colors, artistic elements, and points of stylistic differentiation are important when building the look and feel of your PAC brand.
Professionalism and Consistency. Establishing a professional look and feel for your PAC brand can go a long way in lending credibility to the goals and mission you are communicating to potential donors. While the larger organization may have brand standards from which you can base your PAC brand, setting brand standards for the PAC itself ensures that the PAC is mission focused, providing a clear, consistent narrative to your audience.
PAC Logo. Utilize a high quality, PAC specific logo in order to differentiate the PAC from the larger organization and focus the viewer onto the specific objectives of the PAC and its mission. This logo should be crafted to work in conjunction with the main logo of the organization but strong enough to stand on its own, establishing authority for the PAC brand.
PAC Color Palette. It is likely that your larger organization has a color palette already established. Working alongside the communications team of the larger organization, think about utilizing a specific set of colors from the larger palette so viewers can quickly identify a message is from the PAC.
PAC Brand Voice. Develop a consistent tone of voice for your writing so that readers feel a sense of continuity to the narrative you present as a PAC. Abrupt tonal shifts from one communication to the next can leave your messaging feeling muddled and disjointed.
PAC Style. Each message coming from the PAC should have the same look and feel as the others, so it is crucial that the overall designs of these messages have consistent styling elements, fonts, and iconography that enable the viewer to quickly recognize a PAC communication.
Authenticity. Ensure the messages you are communicating reflect the mission and values of your organization. This is accomplished by more than just the tone in the writing, but also by aligning the choices in the colors, shapes, and fonts used with the overall story you are telling. If these elements do not align with the narrative you are trying to communicate, the messaging will feel inauthentic.
Engagement. Developing messages that are visually engaging ensures that your audience takes the time to digest the content you are sharing. Your message is more than just text on the page. Creating a strong and consistent visual hierarchy for your brand can help guide your readers to the content that is most important. Effectively utilizing shape, imagery, color, and white space can be strong tools in building a brand that successfully draws the eye of the viewer.
Your PAC brand is a conduit through which you communicate your goals and objectives to your audience. In order to properly convey your story, it is important to understand how your PAC integrates within the larger organization and communicate that visually and linguistically through the elements of your brand. You can achieve this through the development of a professional PAC brand that establishes trust and reliability through consistency, authenticity, and engagement. Ensuring that these brand elements reflect your PAC mission and values creates a compelling experience for your audience that ties together your story across channels and over time.
To learn more about how we can strengthen your PAC branding, contact our team today at info@sagac.com.