Best Practices of International Branding for NGOs in China

International branding increases fundraising outreach.

Branding provides legitimate reputation to NGOs and creates feeling of trust in stakeholders.

Create international exchange to connect China with the rest of the world and increase international knowledge about China.

Create international exchange so people inside and outside of China can learn from each other and understand each other’s issues.

Working together with international organizations increases organizational capacity.

Partnering with international organizations increases accountability in Chinese NGOs.

It is common to utilize the organizational vision as was originally written by the founder of the NGO.

When updating the vision, all main staff members are included in the decision-making.

It is common to have a shared organizational value that fosters commitment to the job and to reaching visible results.

Shared commitment fosters innovation inside the organization.

Visual brand symbols are important for recognizability, visibility, differentiation, reputation, loyalty, and more.

Consistency in visual brand symbols is vital to reach recognizability.

Targeting the right people with the right channels optimizes time spent on branding activities and increases brand familiarity.

Where to find which audience on which channels can be evaluated by considering a channel’s purpose and deriving the users, and thus your audience, from that.

Stakeholders that were more frequently and directly contacted have a more positive overall impression of an NGO.

The more personal contact with stakeholders, the more control an NGO has over how the stakeholder sees them.

Leveraging pre-existing connections can be critical in the early stages of international expansion because it can help get a foot in the door of the international sector.

To know what existing connections to use, evaluate organizational goals, and decide which connections could be leveraged to reach those goals.

Short content in text is defined as having 50 words or less, and in video it is 5 minutes or less in length.

People generally engage quicker with short content than long content.

Images are used by almost all respondents on all platforms.

Visual stimuli are learned faster and remembered longer than verbal stimuli.

A combination of informing about products and services and interacting and connecting with users is most commonly applied on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

On LinkedIn and on organizations’ websites, 50% or more of NGOs just informed about products and services.

A significant number of NGOs did not follow an observable structure in their post frequency.

The majority of NGOs still posted frequently or at least once per month.

The performance of the brand depends on what is said about the NGO, thus this needs to be monitored.

Monitoring the brand can be done through online tools.

Evaluating the results of the brand monitoring is important to decide what actions to take to ensure brand performance is kept up to standard.

Evaluations can be done structurally or whenever performance was shown to be particularly high or low.