Justifying the Investment in Brand Building

Branding/marketing isn’t going to do anything for your org…if you can’t fund it in the first place. 

Unfortunately, justifying the investment in this work — both money AND capacity — for social impact orgs doesn’t come as easily as it might for other sectors. And right now everyone is still stuck in the “do more with less” mentality. 

Here’s how to make a solid case for the investment — whether you’re pitching your leadership team, funders, or anyone else that needs buy-in to make it work:

1. Empathize with decision-makers

Understand what decision makers value and what other priorities they are focused on. This work isn’t the only thing on their mind just because it’s important to you. 

2. Connect work to financial health

You have to make a case that this work is not just “feel good” work, but actually leads to better financial sustainability for the org. (Teaser: we’re going deep into this in next week’s episode).

3. Tie initiatives to impact

Connect the dots between this investment and how it will actually create impact for your community and help you reach your mission more quickly/effectively.

4. De-risk the investment

Use a pilot project or a phased approach to de-risk the investment and lower the barrier to entry.

5. Propose what to deprioritize

Realize that saying yes to this most likely means saying no to other valid projects. Come prepared with which projects you would recommend deprioritizing.

6. Present your project team

Think through WHO on your team will be involved and how this will affect their capacity. This shows that you understand this will take time and energy and make for easier planning.

In today’s episode of Designing Tomorrow, Jonathan and I dive deep into each of these points, plus we cover:

→ How to appeal to personal motivations

→ Making concrete connections to growth or cost savings

→ Aligning with your mission and impact

→ Balancing risk and reward

→ Managing internal resources effectively

But here's the kicker: There's one unexpected benefit of investing in branding/marketing that most people overlook. It's so powerful, it might just be the most important (but rarely discussed) return on your investment.

Curious? You'll have to listen to find out. 

Whether you're a CEO/ED, marketing lead, or passionate team member trying to drive change, this episode has some road-tested ideas to help you make your case.

Episode Highlights

• [00:07] Introduction to the topic: why social impact organizations underinvest in marketing
• [01:13] Importance of empathizing with decision-makers to justify marketing spend
• [02:52] Eric shares insights on working with clients and buy-in challenges
• [05:19] Connecting marketing spend to financial health and measurable impact
• [07:33] The complexities of proving marketing ROI and the value of strategic thinking
• [09:51] The role of risk management in marketing investments
• [14:10] Unexpected internal benefits of a rebrand and its impact on organizational clarity

Quotes

• "You need to help them understand that by spending money in this space, it is going to make their job easier or better or more effective in some way."  - Jonathan Hicken [01:38]
• "Tying the impact of marketing and branding work to financial gains or impact is not necessarily easy... but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt to measure it." - Eric Ressler [06:59]
• "I will even argue that most people fail in marketing because they are not risky enough in their investment in marketing." - Eric Ressler [11:06]
• "There are immediate internal wins that happen... when a rebrand is done strategically and well." - Eric Ressler [14:52]
• "If you or the person trying to justify the spend, you should be prepared to answer the question, what do we stop doing in order to start doing this right?" - Jonathan Hicken [16:23]

Resources:

• Episode inspired by an article in - TheySaid’s 2.0 Magazine 
• Want to Scale Your Social Impact? Your Brand is the Fuel.
• Beyond Aesthetics: The ROI of Brand Building
• Brand Building: An Authentic Approach to Growing a Fierce, Loyal, and Supportive Community

Transcript:

Jonathan Hicken [00:00]:

Eric. Last week we were talking about why social impact organizations underinvest in marketing. So we tried to dissect the reasons that an organization might end up in that place, and it really got me thinking about what it would take for a leader in a social impact organization to justify the spend to whoever the decision makers are. And actually this is perfect timing because there's someone on my team right now who is lobbying me to do a major rebrand and strategic positioning exercise. So I actually started thinking about between our conversation and that conversation at work, what would I need to hear in order to approve the spend for my organization? And hopefully there are some things that our listeners might take away from this as well. Should we get into it?

Eric Ressler [00:46]:

This one should be interesting. Let's do it.

Jonathan Hicken [00:48]:

All right, here we go.

Jonathan Hicken [01:13]:

The first and arguably most important step for someone working in a social impact organization to take to justify the spend on marketing or branding is to empathize with the decision maker who's going to approve the spend. Here's what I mean by that. You need to deeply understand what that decision maker is focused on and what success looks like to them. You need to help them understand that by spending money in this space, it is going to make their job easier or better or more effective in some way. So you got to go down to that personal motivation level. So for example, if you're trying to convince the CEO that they should spend more on marketing and branding, well, what does that CEO focus on at that given time? Maybe it's a yearly priority, maybe it's a pillar in their strategic plan, maybe it's a particular project. What does that CEO or executive director care about at that moment? You need to make them understand that an investment in marketing or branding is going to help them do that thing better. Is this something that you have heard or that you have seen in working with clients given that they're already coming to you with some level of approval?

Eric Ressler [02:30]:

Yeah, it's interesting because by the time people are coming to us, usually there's some amount of buy-in and a decision has been made that they're ready, they've got funds available. In the best case scenario, maybe not always, but we don't always get to see what happened before that point. We hear stories sometimes and we get some background from clients, but this is largely shrouded in mystery for me. So I'm really actually quite interested to hear some of these ideas and maybe sneakily pass them along to people who I know want to do some of this work but haven't been able to get buy-in. I really like this reframe because I often think about this from the perspective of like, well, how does this benefit the organization at large? But this is sneaky. This is almost conniving. How will this benefit the person that I need to approve this sneaky stuff here? I like it

Jonathan Hicken [03:22]:

And I mean it really is true. We're all human beings. We all have our personal motivations and frankly, we got to appeal to those things. And so that was a case of approaching A CEO. You may need to be approaching a CFO sort of position, a chief financial officer or someone who's leading that side of the business, their motivations could be completely different If they're the last person who's going to put a stamp on this spend, you need to understand what that person's motivated by too. So there is some deeply personal investigations that need to happen before you attempt to go make a justification to spend on branding and marketing.

Eric Ressler [04:00]:

So if you're the internal champion on this work, you kind of got to know a little bit about each of the stakeholders and decision makers who need their stamp of approval and figure out how you can authentically but creatively pitch this to them in a way that resonates and that's empathetic to their priorities.

Jonathan Hicken [04:18]:

And I would say for the person on my team, if you're listening, you should ask me, “what do I care about right now?”.  And I would welcome that question now. Now that's an executive director or CEO at any organization may not welcome that direct level of questioning, but I certainly would and I would hope that the person on my team who wants to do a rebrand will ask me that someday. And if they don't, I'm probably going to tell them to ask me that so that they can make the justification stronger. The second thing is to connect the work to the financial health of the company and to connect the work to the impact that you seek. And now this is kind of obvious, but let's break each of these down a little bit more deeply. So connecting the work to the financial health of the company.

[05:09]:

There's really two, maybe three outcomes that executive leaders are going to be thinking about when it comes to the financial health of the company. Is this spend going to help me make money or is it going to help me save money? That's it. I mean that's what it comes down to. And the timescales on each of those can be different. Maybe it's a quick win, maybe it's a multi-year burn kind of thing. But you as the person who's going to champion this spend and needs to justify it, you need to make a very hard and concrete connection to growth or to cost savings. And so a recommendation I have for listeners to look at, break this down, ask for the numbers If you don't have them at your fingertips, how much are you spending on marketing right now? However you might define that. And then do some simple math in terms of how you're measuring outcome and do a proportional estimate.

[06:02]:

If it's like, let's say I'm spending a hundred thousand dollars on marketing today per year and we are feeding a hundred thousand families, if we spent 200,000, what is the likelihood that we could also double the amount of families we could feed on that? It might not be a one-to-one ratio, and so you may need to do some more justification, but just as a simple frame of mind, that's the way I would be thinking about it. When you work with your clients, do they have the level of insight into the impact that they're having or on their own marketing spend to be able to do that kind of calculation for themselves?

Eric Ressler [06:37]:

It really just depends. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And I think I want to acknowledge that tying the impact of marketing and branding work to financial gains or impact is not necessarily easy, and I'm going to even go out on a limb and say, you can never fully capture the benefit. I think that that doesn't mean you shouldn't attempt to measure it, it doesn't mean that you can't measure some of it. The way that you just described. Trying to measure it and trying to project the potential for impact, I think is a good approach. What I might recommend is kind of outlining sort of a worst case, best case middle case approach. Instead of coming to leadership and saying, we know that if we invest this much in marketing, we are going to get this return in financial performance or impact performance because at the end of the day, there is no true guarantee that an investment in marketing or branding will absolutely result in X returns.

[07:34]:

If you have been doing this for a very long time, you can point to historical data and say, traditionally, for every X dollars of spend we put towards marketing, we see X dollars of returns in this area. Likely if we do that and expand that, we expect to see that more. But that's also not guaranteed because sometimes there's even saturating the market where if you reach a certain threshold, spending more money on marketing might not return the same proportional returns on investment. So this is complicated stuff. This is not simple math. There's a lot of factors that go into the return on investment in branding and marketing, but I agree that making a case for hey, investing in branding, investing in marketing is likely to create these types of outcomes in this range of probability or create the conditions that will make it more likely that will be more successful in fundraising or in some of the impact metrics that we're measuring. So in general, in principle, totally agree.

Jonathan Hicken [08:45]:

So if you are someone who's trying to justify the spend and you are the internal champion and you're convincing your CEO or your CFO or your executive director of the board, whatever, oftentimes you're going to do this, right? You got to invest at the right level. In my experience, this is not something you want to half-ass, so you have to de-risk it. Now you de-risk a big investment like that. Well, one way to do it would be to propose some sort of small scale pilot,

[09:12]:

Something that's smaller that the executive director or CFO can green light with some very, very narrow very specific outcomes to demonstrate success. Give evidence that a larger investment is going to produce even more returns on your pilot. So there may be other ways of de-risking the investment, but ultimately you may need to prove yourself if you really believe in this and you got to figure out what is that experiment or what is that pilot that I can use to prove this? What are the conversations that you have around risk when you're undertaking these big projects with Cosmic?

Eric Ressler [09:51]:

Yeah, I mean I think there's always a risk in any big bet like this, any big investment, that it won't pay off whatever that means to you at the level that you want it to, or even worst case, maybe it even backfires, it moves you backwards. Of course, that's worst case scenario. So yes, a small pilot project is a way to de-risk. Another common, and I would say probably even more common approach would be a phased plan where you don't commit to a hundred or $200,000 spend in this year right away, but you carve out a small discovery phase or a small strategic phase to start with and then move into the next phase of some creative execution or implementation. That's another form of de-risking the balance here, I think, is that there's certain things that you can't scale down or phase out or at least do that easily.

[10:42]:

And I'm not suggesting that that is an argument against a pilot project or a phasing, it's just you have to be strategic around what you do, and sometimes you do need to take a big risk, and I will even argue that most people fail in marketing because they're not risky enough in their investment in marketing, they're playing it too safe, and that ironically ends up making it not very effective. And so there's an art and a science to this. I think risk is definitely something that comes into play even at a personal level because if you are, let's say A CMO type championing this, if this doesn't go well, your job is likely on the line. You don't get to mess something like this up if that's your role, if you're the founder or the executive director, it could even be the same If the board can make an argument that this spending was unwise or too risky or didn't pay off, that could be a huge miss on your record. This kind of work is important. It's important to do well, it's important to do intentionally, and there's a tough tension between being risky and taking big bets and also not wanting those big bets to fail.

Jonathan Hicken [11:48]:

Yeah, I mean all the more reason then to combine point number one with point number four, which is to empathize with the decision maker. You're trying to convince and understand what is their risk tolerance?

[12:00]:

You need to understand that. And then if you need to propose a pilot that's going to ease their fears towards making the big bet, maybe that's a step you need to take so that you can return to them and say, look, I know you're nervous about this and here's at least some evidence that an investment here is going to pay off. We skipped connecting the work to the impact. And so it's similar to the financial point, right? In the social impact space, we've got the double bottom line. So any investment we make, especially a big one, we have to tie back to both of those outcomes you need to show me and really not a dotted line, a solid line, how an investment here is going to improve our impact. I also need to see that this investment and how we go about this project is going to align with everything in our brand and everything in our mission. One fear I would have, and one fear I do have with the team member who's proposing a rebrand is that we lose sight unintentionally of the impact that we're delivering today and that we may let down the people who are currently walking through our doors.

[13:05]:

And that's something that it's really important to me that we do not lose sight of that as a part of this process. So that's what I mean by making the alignment with the mission and the impact so comprehensive that the leader you're trying to justify to, can't really poke holes in it in terms of at least the theoretical benefit of the investment.

Eric Ressler [13:27]:

Yeah, I would agree. And I mean to speak to your point a bit about not wanting to let down the current experience or the current supporters, yeah, there's a trade off here and I think that's why framing this and thinking about it as an investment in your future is the right way to think about it. Now, I will say that I've seen so many examples where there's these intangible, unexpected benefits of rebranding that people don't think they're buying when they're buying a rebrand and maybe even ends up becoming the most important return on their investment, and that is by going through the process of a rebrand, especially if we're talking about a true rebrand that is largely strategic in nature and not just cosmetic. That process is so valuable if it's done well because it forces you to get really clear on who you are, what you stand for, what your niche is, what your values are, how are you going to spread and tell your story, how will you communicate as an organization, how does that trickle down to how you actually run things and interact with the people that you serve?

[14:30]:

This is work that's really important and has huge benefits outside of what people traditionally think about as a rebrand and the ROI of that happens immediately as you were doing that work. It does not happen later. And so with a rebrand or any big investment in marketing, if it's done strategically and done well, there are these immediate internal wins that happen, and I think celebrating those wins is a great way to get some of that early positive feedback for stakeholders. I think to your point around is this going to distract us from our core mission or make it difficult for us to come through on the promises that we've already made as an organization? I think that's a valid concern and one that needs to be planned for. And I think sometimes people do underestimate the amount of time and effort and energy that needs to go into any big play like this, and so you need to schedule for that, right?

[15:26]:

You are making intentional choices just like any other investment in your future, whether if it's a rebrand or not, that you're going to have to prioritize it and deprioritize other things. So is it the right time to do that? It depends, right? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But I agree that if you just kind of go in without intentionally understanding that you can get in underwater and then you're not doing any of your work well, so I think it's one to be aware of. I don't think it's a reason not to do a rebrand or any big investment in marketing. You just need to make sure to plan accordingly,

Jonathan Hicken [15:59]:

Which is a perfect segue into tip number five, which is if you or the person trying to justify the spend, you should be prepared to answer the question, what do we stop doing in order to start doing this, right? So you need to be able to propose some level of prioritization, what falls out, what falls out of our current work in order to put the time and energy into this project that it's going to take to do it excellently? So you, as the person justifying it, you need to come to the table with that understanding again of the leader's own personal priorities and motivations and come at least prepared to propose what is going to get deprioritized.

[16:44]:

This is a bonus extra credit if you can do this, but I think you should come to your CEO or CFO or executive director and you should propose the project team. Here are the people in our organization who are going to run this, and maybe you've already talked to them and they're on board to help with this, and they're ready to commit X amount of their time to this project. If my teammate came to me and was like, these three people have already signed up, we're ready to do this. That would give me a tremendous level of confidence that the person who's proposing this investment is serious. Those are the six points, Eric, and I'm curious, I'll repeat them to you. I want to know what your main takeaways are from today's conversation. One, empathize with the CEO or CFO or whoever the decision maker is, connect the work to the financial health of the company, connect it to the impact, de-risk it, prioritize it, and propose the team.

Eric Ressler [17:37]:

Yeah, I think those are all great points to speak to the last one about the team, this is something we actually get asked about a lot. How big should the team be? Who should be part of the process? Who should not be part of the process? Of course, it depends a lot on the culture, right? Our preference, frankly, is that we want the executive director or the CEO of the organization involved, at least at a high level, if not deeply involved. I can't think of a single project that went worse because we had a CEO involved or an executive director involved. I can think of a few projects that I think would've gone better if we had more attention from those leaders, and I think that that might be the nature of the kind of transformations that we help our clients with. We rarely have to fight for that, but sometimes we do, and I think we were willing to kind of make a case for why it's important enough to at least have leadership involved at some of the bigger decision points in the work that we do, but having a good tight-knit team internally for the organization is critical.

[18:34]:

Having that team consistently show up throughout the process and have ownership of it is critical. And having that team not be too large is critical too, because then you start to get into decision paralysis and just too many cooks in the kitchen, and it's just hard to reach consensus. So that's a nuanced point. Maybe we can talk about that in a future episode, but I like these points. I hope this is helpful for our listeners who are maybe thinking about investing in branding and marketing and trying to make a case and bring that to leadership. I think a lot of these points are super valid and I've seen them work before.

Jonathan Hicken [19:05]:

All right. Good luck to all you out there justifying the spend on marketing your branding. Otherwise, Eric, I think that'll do it for today.

Eric Ressler [19:12]:

Sounds good. Thanks, Jonathan.