Stop trying to be different. Start being distinctive.
Research Director, Bijal Rama & Senior Researcher, Logan DiFranco write:
Some brands you'd know blindfolded. A tone of voice, a turn of phrase, a way of saying things that's unmistakably them. We dug into this at our webinar in July on how charity brands grow.
Clients sometimes come to us asking what makes them different. What's their unique selling point? How do they stand apart from others working in the same space? It's a fair question, but it's often the wrong one. Our research shows us what they should be asking. In the charity sector, just as in the commercial world, differentiation matters far less than distinctiveness. Nobody needs to be doing something entirely unique. What matters is whether your voice is recognisably, reliably you. Could they hear your ad and know it's you? Read your caption and think "that sounds like their brand"? Byron Sharp's work on “how brands grow” shows why distinctiveness matters: distinctive brands are the ones people notice and remember. Recognition is what builds loyalty and drives growth.
We've spent over 20 years understanding how the public perceives charity brands through nfpPublic and nfpBrand. nfpPublic measures the public’s awareness levels, trust and propensity to support charities. nfpBrand looks specifically at those who are familiar with an organisation to grasp their perceptions of a brand and what they believe their voice or personality is. It also explores what drives affinity towards your charity.
What we've built now is something new which complements nfpBrand, the Brand Voice Library: a way of measuring the voice charities put out into the world. We've gathered every public digital communication from the top 100 spontaneously mentioned charities, these communications being from websites and socials to YouTube, DRTV and Meta ads. Then using a trained AI model, we scored each communication against 54 variables covering tone, emotion, personality and values. That's over 27,000 items coded so far, refreshed daily, and it's just a starting point. We're open to adding more brands and comparators if there's a charity you'd like to see included.
Some of the case studies we shared on the webinar stuck with us. For example, CALM ranks 22nd for distinctiveness, earning that by being loud in a quiet sector, treating suicide as something to confront rather than a topic to avoid, and holds that tone consistently across its channels. Woodgreen ranks 18th, leaning harder into warmth, humour and storytelling than any peer, built around named pets and named people. And then there's a charity whose voice on socials is one of the most distinctive we've seen, all humour and personality, but their website tells a completely different story. The gap between the two is one of the most interesting things we've uncovered, and we go into exactly why on the recording. That gap is the useful bit. It's not enough to know you're distinctive. You need to know if your voice is landing, or if there's a chasm to bridge between channels.
This is what the library gives you: distinctiveness and consistency scores against the sector, what you over- or under-index on by channel. If you are a nfpBrand client, you can then compare how the public perceives your brand against how your voice is scored in the brand voice library. Using both products together presents a full picture of who your brand is and who the public thinks it is, allowing you to identify any gaps or misalignments that need to be addressed, or potentially reveals that your brand is understood the way you want it to be both by the AI and the public.
We're offering the Brand Voice library to the first five clients at a pilot price of £3,000 +VAT. Watch the full webinar to see it in action, and get in touch if you'd like to talk about what it could look like for your brand, or about signing up for the next wave of nfpBrand.