4 years ago
How can charities benefit from a brand management solution?
Marcel van den Boogaard
An organisations brand is an essential component to drive a consistent message, build trust and ultimately engage build loyalty with employees, supporters, fundraisers, donors and the general public.
It’s important to remember that a brand management solution isn’t just about a piece of technology. The online platform is just one component part that makes up the entire brand management solution. Implementing the right strategy has countless benefits. We’ve highlighted what we consider to be the most important.
Access
Making your brand accessible via a cloud based platform has never been easier and more essential. Most Software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms can be integrated with your existing IT ecosystem via Single sign-on (SSO) reducing friction for employees. The platform never sleeps providing 24/7 access to the brand from anywhere even if employees are working remotely. Tailoring access based on roles and privileges adds control at a central level.
Consistency
Brand consistency is a fundamental principle and something increasingly difficult to manage with the ever increasing number of channels available. It can also become difficult where an organisation is spread geographically nationwide or even globally. By implementing and end-to-end brand management solution you can drive brand compliance across every touch point. This could be educating your users on tone of voice via the interactive brand guidelines, using templates for digital file formats such as social media graphics or even defining paper weights and print finishing for the more traditional brand assets such as leaflets, posters and other printed collateral.
Empowerment
Time, effort and money is put in to developing a successful brand and ensuring that your staff feel empowered to use it is essential. Not only will they feel more connected to the brand, but the brand will also become more productive. Providing your teams access to brand assets to use, but also creating their own assets puts the power back in their hands. Pre-agreed templates can be created to allow editing and localisation. All this can be done in the browser with no additional software or training. Even better, you can keep complete control centrally by defining the editable content, but also adding approval workflows to check every template that’s created. An added benefit to this is the time and cost saving on your own design studio or the agencies you might be using.
Centralisation
Extending the brand management solution outside of an online environment has exponential benefits across the whole organisation. By using a platform to drive print on demand, stock print ordering and even merchandise fulfilment can drastically improve your ability to distribute items to branches and geographic offices. It removes the burden on your internal teams and provides the power of ordering back to your teams. By using one central source costs can be set and managed, budgets can be controlled and accountability managed. By utilising an online platform to manage this you can use a multi supplier network and automate workflow for budget and order approvals and streamline the support directly to your teams. SLA’s can be set and managed to ensure you retain speed to market. Procuring, ordering and managing physical marketing material has never been easier.
Visibility
By using a brand management solution you gain access to valuable insight into every interaction with the brand. Who’s’ using it, what’s being downloaded, what’s being created and what people are ordering. This visibility will help drive decisions when creating and refining brand assets, help forecast for the future when ordering print or merchandise, identify training or engagement opportunities with staff. Complicated financial reconciliation will become a thing of the past with complete 360 degree feedback on every transaction, payment, budget and stock movement. All this data can be consumed via dedicated reporting dashboards meaning it’s available in real-time 24/7.
It’s important to remember that a brand management solution isn’t just about a piece of technology. The online platform is just one component part that makes up the entire brand management solution. Implementing the right strategy has countless benefits. We’ve highlighted what we consider to be the most important.
Access
Making your brand accessible via a cloud based platform has never been easier and more essential. Most Software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms can be integrated with your existing IT ecosystem via Single sign-on (SSO) reducing friction for employees. The platform never sleeps providing 24/7 access to the brand from anywhere even if employees are working remotely. Tailoring access based on roles and privileges adds control at a central level.
Consistency
Brand consistency is a fundamental principle and something increasingly difficult to manage with the ever increasing number of channels available. It can also become difficult where an organisation is spread geographically nationwide or even globally. By implementing and end-to-end brand management solution you can drive brand compliance across every touch point. This could be educating your users on tone of voice via the interactive brand guidelines, using templates for digital file formats such as social media graphics or even defining paper weights and print finishing for the more traditional brand assets such as leaflets, posters and other printed collateral.
Empowerment
Time, effort and money is put in to developing a successful brand and ensuring that your staff feel empowered to use it is essential. Not only will they feel more connected to the brand, but the brand will also become more productive. Providing your teams access to brand assets to use, but also creating their own assets puts the power back in their hands. Pre-agreed templates can be created to allow editing and localisation. All this can be done in the browser with no additional software or training. Even better, you can keep complete control centrally by defining the editable content, but also adding approval workflows to check every template that’s created. An added benefit to this is the time and cost saving on your own design studio or the agencies you might be using.
Centralisation
Extending the brand management solution outside of an online environment has exponential benefits across the whole organisation. By using a platform to drive print on demand, stock print ordering and even merchandise fulfilment can drastically improve your ability to distribute items to branches and geographic offices. It removes the burden on your internal teams and provides the power of ordering back to your teams. By using one central source costs can be set and managed, budgets can be controlled and accountability managed. By utilising an online platform to manage this you can use a multi supplier network and automate workflow for budget and order approvals and streamline the support directly to your teams. SLA’s can be set and managed to ensure you retain speed to market. Procuring, ordering and managing physical marketing material has never been easier.
Visibility
By using a brand management solution you gain access to valuable insight into every interaction with the brand. Who’s’ using it, what’s being downloaded, what’s being created and what people are ordering. This visibility will help drive decisions when creating and refining brand assets, help forecast for the future when ordering print or merchandise, identify training or engagement opportunities with staff. Complicated financial reconciliation will become a thing of the past with complete 360 degree feedback on every transaction, payment, budget and stock movement. All this data can be consumed via dedicated reporting dashboards meaning it’s available in real-time 24/7.
Using a brand management solution to protect and implement your brand dramatically reduces the challenges surrounding budget, time and resource management and will ultimately ensure your brand stays consistent, visible and successful.
To find out more about how Brand iQ can help you to implement your brand contact us
