Make it easy for your volunteers to build your brand.

By Emily Brackett

If your organization relies heavily on volunteers, make sure there is a system for easily maintaining your brand standards. Your brand is an extremely valuable asset, and you want to ensure that your volunteers value, maintain and promote your brand identity correctly.

If you’re lucky enough to attract volunteers, you should feel confident that your mission and organization means something to the volunteers. So, you already have a group of “brand evangelists” ready to work for you. But without the right tools, it is difficult for your volunteers to help you without also creating problems of brand dilution.

One of the risks with using volunteers is that there are generally lots of people, many of whom are undertrained. So you need to make it easy on yourself and your volunteers to adhere to branding standards.

Letter writing
If you have volunteers sending letters or emails, provide templates for them. Templates should be created in Word (or the software of your choice) and should have the identity items already in place. That will ensure the correct organization name, colors, and layout is maintained. Additionally, you may want to provide some writing examples so that a consistent and professional tone of voice is maintained. You need to be consistent so the recipient feels confident they are coming from a trusted source. Especially, no one wants to give money if they think there is something unreliable or maybe even downright forged about an appeal letter. While you should encourage volunteers to add a personal note to recipients they know, make sure there is a uniform look to the paper, the graphics, typography and the text, and then leave an area for personalization.

Identify your volunteers
If you have volunteers out in the field at a special event, make them easy to find. T-shirts are the easiest way to quickly identify volunteers and spread the brand identity at your event. But hats, visors, arm bands or lanyards are other possibilities. Make them easily recognizable to build brand identity and attractive enough for volunteers to wear afterward to further promote the event.

Give volunteers key information
It’s easy for your patrons to get frustrated if your volunteers are not helpful. A great idea is to create a “cheat sheet” that is on the back of a lanyard-hanging name tag. The whole card can be branded with your look and feel, and the “cheat sheet” can have FAQ type of information for the volunteer. For example, it should state the mission of the organization, how someone can get involved, who the key organizers are, the web site address, etc. Although your volunteers may be committed enough to spend some time with you, they may not have the whole picture of how your organization works.

Create great signage
I’m always amazed how little signage there are at events such as charity walks, fun runs and fundraisers. Great signage brands an event and helps the volunteers. Signage can build a robust brand identity for your event and organization. You probably already have a logo and key graphics in place, but seeing how this rolls out to signage adds visual appeal and is helpful. Pointing people directly to registration, starting lines, refreshments, and bathrooms allows you to focus on other details that need your attention.

It’s worthwhile to create systems for your volunteers so that design and branding standards can be maintained. Your brand is partly about identity (logo, colors, graphics) and partly about the reputation and personality your organization maintains. Because volunteers often are jumping into a situation with little or no training, providing easy-to-use templates, communicating key information and using your brand standards to build useful things like signs and shirts will help them put your organization’s best foot forward.

Emily Brackett is president of Visible Logic, Inc., a boutique graphic design firm that works across all media, and a guest blogger.