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Creating significant social change is a long game and social impact leaders need to overcome the barriers to brand building and marketing to scale their impact over time.
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This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 09. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.
To keep ourselves up to date, we follow a lot of social impact branding people and social impact marketing people. We also follow a lot of B2B and B2C marketers and branding people. And we've noticed that there's a wildly stark difference between the kinds of conversations that we see in the social impact space and the kinds of conversations we see inside the B2B and B2C spaces.
Why is there this stark difference?
Why is it that so many social impact brands underinvest in brand building and marketing in general?
Although we're starting to see more adoption of brand building and marketing in the social impact space, we're still wildly behind what B2B and B2C marketers and branding people are doing.
Let’s explore the cause of this issue, the barriers social impact leaders face, and try to bridge the gap between the B2B and B2C and the social impact sectors.
There are a lot of structural issues that are the root cause of some of this. But there are also some more specific issues within organizations and within the people themselves.
But let's start with one of the more structural issues here — these organizations are just under-resourced. They don't have the capacity, the funding, or even the discretionary income. They might have funding, but it's tied up in program work. They want to invest in marketing. They want to invest in brand building. But they just don't have the money or the ability to spend the money where it needs to be spent.
Sometimes this reason can also be a cover for what is actually a prioritization decision — where the resources exist and the leader of the organization has decided to spend it elsewhere. And sometimes a leader will say that they can't invest in marketing as opposed to deciding not to invest in marketing.
Sometimes that’s a conscious cover, sometimes it’s an unconscious one. But at the end of the day, any sort of decision around spending — unless the money is truly restricted, which is real — then it's almost always a prioritization decision.
When we've seen really effective brand building and marketing outside of the social impact space — and even inside the social impact space — there's usually at least one internal champion that deeply believes in the work. That’s either because they've seen it work really well before or they trust that it's important because they've observed the positive impact at other organizations. So, sometimes there's just not someone who understands that value and can champion the idea within the organization.
There are two pieces to this:
Most organizations have that storyteller somewhere and it's just a matter of unlocking their storytelling. They might be in the organization. They might try to champion it. But maybe they're not in a position of enough influence to do that, or they can't secure the budget to do it, or leadership doesn't have buy-in on it.
The third thing that we've seen block organizations from investing in brand building and marketing is that they don't know how to connect the return on that investment to their mission. It's something maybe they want to do and they start exploring the path, but then they start to get some questions, some valid questions, even, from board members or funders around how this work is going to actually move the mission forward. And then they get caught flatfooted. They don't have a solid answer or a convincing, compelling answer.
Why is that the case?
Oftentimes it comes with this undertone that marketing and brand building is somehow immoral or uncouth to go and celebrate or to shout your story from the rooftop — that somehow that solely is your impact or your mission. There’s a perception that true social good comes with a quiet tongue. We don’t think that this approach is the best way to advance impact.
Now, there could be organizations where it is actually best to stay low key. But instances where there's an argument to be made that the work that you're doing should stay hidden behind the scenes is a rare exception.
It seems that the overhead myth is apparently never going to fully die. And this work — investing in branding, investing in marketing, and investing in communications — is sometimes lumped into an overhead category. There’s a perception that it’s not “true” program work or work that is directly related to the impact. But that’s not true.
A great example of this would be a public health campaign where you need to create behavior change or spread knowledge about something. How are you going to do that without investing in marketing and communications and branding to some degree? So, even for less obvious use cases, compartmentalizing this into the overhead category is a little bit of a fallacy.
A lot of brilliant people have spoken about the overhead myth — Dan Pallotta being one of them. His thesis is that at the end of the day, all that matters is impact. Why are for-profit- oriented organizations being held to a set of standards around delivering a great product or a great service and showing returns in that way and they're not scrutinized for their spend in marketing and sales? The same standards should be applied to the social impact space.
When social impact organizations are applying for grants or putting proposals in front of major donors, we need to stop putting marketing in the overhead bucket. We need to start lumping it in with our program costs or our program delivery costs and stand behind that. They need to say that this is part of the impact we deliver. This is not overhead. This is a necessary spend for impact.
We made up this term to describe how social impact organizations seem to like wearing a badge of honor around being scrappy.
We're doing work behind the scenes.
We don't need to talk about our work.
It's so important. It doesn't even need to be marketed.
This is a huge fallacy. Some organizations believe that they earn credibility for white-knuckling it and getting the job done — whatever it takes. And sometimes that means putting their heads down and grinding it out and not telling the story. That mindset exists in lots of organizations, frankly, not just social impact ones.
We’ve seen it in startup culture. There's a similar hustle culture around not needing to do marketing. However, a lot of startups build marketing budgets into their angel funding round. That's something that traditionally we've seen come a lot later in the social impact life cycle.
Of course, we’re biased here, but we’re big believers in the approach that the best time to start marketing is at the very beginning. But the second best time is — as soon as you possibly can.
One thing that's stopping organizations from investing is a false dichotomy between fundraising and marketing. They believe that marketing and fundraising are competing for resources or that they aren't supporting one another.
We see fundraising and marketing as two sides of a coin working together synergistically. You don't need to choose between investing in fundraising and marketing. Ideally, you're investing in both and they're working together.
This may seem harsh, but if your fundraising and your marketing teams aren’t playing well together, you’re failing as a social impact leader. They can be more than the sum of their parts when they're working together.
When fundraising, you’re looking for the right people to talk to. You want to tell great stories of impact and get this donor to buy in. You need the marketing team to be doing both of those things. They need to be producing quantitative results — which can generate warm qualified donor leads — and also crafting these wonderful impact stories.
Your marketing teams need you to tell them:
It’s an absolute must that these teams and these functions work side by side, hand in hand. Otherwise, you're not succeeding as a leader.
The reason we frame this as a false dichotomy is because we've seen, so many times, organizations choosing to either invest in fundraising or in marketing — as if you need to make one of those two choices. Maybe sometimes you only have so much you can invest, and so you do need to make one of those two choices. But ideally, you're able to build both of those teams so they work together, they support one another, and they learn from one another.
We’re not fundraisers. But we've worked with a lot of fundraisers. And one of the things we've heard over and over again from fundraisers within organizations that we've helped, is just how grateful they are for all of the pre-work that marketing has done well. We often hear that marketing makes their job so much easier because they don't have to spend two, three, or four meetings building credibility; building reputation for the organization to the same level that the marketing team has already done. I'm starting three or four steps ahead of where I used to start before.
When someone from leadership or the development team is coming to the table with a donor who has already become familiar with the impact that you deliver — learned from your content and from your storytelling — the minute you sit down, you're having a different kind of conversation. It's less about who you are, what you do, what you’re about, and what's your vision? And it's more like, how can we accelerate this? How can we hit the ground running? Especially for a fundraiser who's on a quota, being able to jump a couple of steps ahead is a massive win.
Sometimes leadership wants to do marketing and brand building, but they can't get buy-in from their team or their board. Sometimes a board member wants to do this, but they can't get buy-in from the team or leadership, and sometimes, someone on the team wants to do this. Maybe a CMO type person wants to do this, but they can't get buy-in from either leadership or the board. So there's just no buy-in organizationally across the board.
In our experience, if you’re struggling to get buy-in across the organization, that probably means that you're pitching it incorrectly. This is something that you can control. Making the right case ultimately comes back to things like needing hard evidence that an investment in brand and marketing is going to either accelerate or deepen your impact, or that it's going to bring in more funds. Is it furthering the impact or furthering the financial sustainability of the organization? You need to be making a bulletproof case to your team or your leadership in order to get that buy-in.
And frankly, that can be hard. Because it’s truthfully not guaranteed to do that. It is a bet that investing in it is likely to create the conditions for that to happen. There are things that you can do strategically to make it more likely, but it is not guaranteed. If it were a guarantee, literally everyone would do this, right?
There's an overall cultural story in the social impact space about how we don't need to do marketing, or marketing is bad. Marketing is money and time and energy that could better be spent on direct work. Again, this is related to the overhead myth or overhead framing.
In some cases, it might make sense to pump the brakes on investing in marketing. If you've hit the right size, you are solving the problem you set out to solve, and you have the right money to do it, there is definitely a moment where you can think you’ve done enough. You've invested enough here. For most organizations, that's probably not a satisfactory answer. There's a hunger to do more, to go deeper, to serve more people.
This belief that marketing somehow is a moral dark side in social impact work certainly exists. It probably goes back decades. The good news is that in our time doing social impact work, that tune is changing. More organizations undergo a rebrand, or to invest more in marketing.
The good news is that we’ve been seeing in the social impact space is that the overall culture around brand building and marketing is changing. We hope that this means that the sector will start to attract more savvy marketers and creatives to the space. Currently, these people are often attracted to organizations that aren't in the social impact space because they have bigger marketing budgets or more marketing positions or more branding positions.
But a lot of people — designers, storytellers, strategists, and writers want to be doing purposeful social impact work and are hungry for these positions. We hope that we continue to see change in the future, because we strongly believe that creative work can really accelerate the impact for organizations. We’re hopeful that these barriers will start to shrink a little bit, and that there are more and more best-in-class examples of branding and marketing happening in the social impact space.
The connection between an investment in marketing and being able to tie that really clearly to mission-based outcomes is probably the single biggest of any of the hurdles we discussed. It’s a really, really challenging argument to make for most organizations in our space.
Measuring some of this work can be difficult. This is why a lot of organizations fall into the trap of transactional marketing because it's a lot easier to measure than a broader, long game brand building approach. But creating significant social change is also a long game. And you’re going to need to do brand building and marketing if you’re going to stay relevant and scale your impact over time. Organizations that embrace this reality position themselves for longevity and move their mission forward faster.
For the vast majority of organizations, there is nothing morally wrong about sharing your story and your impact loudly and proudly.
For a lot of program work, storytelling and communications is integral to the work being effective in the first place.
If there’s no organizational buy-in then it's going to be really hard to make a case for investing time, energy, and money into marketing and brand building.
There is a growing understanding of the power of branding and marketing.
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