Why Your Staff Keep Ignoring the Brand Guidelines

Your organization has a brand style guide. You should know—you wrote it yourself, or you commissioned it, or you inherited it and spent months making it better. You presented it at a staff meeting, included it in the onboarding packet, and pinned it in the shared team drive.

So, why, then, does Sharon from Development insist on purchasing and distributing notebooks with your nonprofit’s old logo from twelve years ago, to high-value donors, nonetheless?

It’s easy to assume that Sharon has ulterior motives: maybe she’s stubborn (or lazy) and plans to keep doing things the way she’s always done them. Or maybe she just resents you and is thus intentionally playing double dutch with your last nerve.

From your point of view, you’d probably call this a compliance problem, and the solution to compliance problems is to double down and send a sterner reminder. Right? Well, before you politely yell at Sharon over email in corporate-speak, let’s take a step back.

Compliance runs on convenience

Are you familiar with the concept of “desire paths”? College campus architects know them well: a desire path is the dirt path that cuts diagonally across a college lawn, eight feet from a perfectly good sidewalk. Desire paths pop up whenever users are sufficiently motivated to take the efficient path rather than the conventional path (like booking it to class five minutes after rolling out of bed). 

Desire paths teach us something important about brand compliance: when the official path differs too much from the most efficient path, people will create a workaround. Some effort is to be expected in bringing a given document or output up to brand standards, but excessive effort reads to your staff as inefficiency. 

This is especially true for nonprofit branding strategy, where communications often come from people with varying skill levels, priorities, and job descriptions. The person creating an event graphic may have no design experience—that’s simply a reality of the many-hatted nonprofit life. Their priority is getting the event promoted before Friday, not maintaining perfect typographic consistency. 

Your nonprofit branding strategy needs to be robust enough to accommodate that reality. If you want better brand compliance, your best strategy is to make the official route the fastest one. 

So, how can your brand guidelines make brand compliance easier? Let’s start by looking at the places where your staff are leaving the paved path—that’s how you’ll figure out where to repave.

As a rule of thumb, there are three common reasons people leave the path:

• If they started from a blank page because they couldn’t find a template, you have a tools problem. 
• If they never knew the guidelines existed, you have a training problem. 
• If they found the guidelines, understood them, and still chose to build something different, you have a brand problem.

They don’t know how to use the brand guidelines.

If your brand guidelines use a lot of designer lingo, are distributed across three different documents, or are forty pages long, this is probably your problem area. People can’t follow a system they don’t understand. Even a well-built brand guide becomes useless when staff members can’t quickly figure out what applies to the thing they’re trying to make.

Thankfully, this is one of the easier problems to solve. Make the guidelines easy to find and even easier to understand, add a short brand compliance workshop to your onboarding process, and develop a one-page quick-start guide that answers the questions you hear most often.

The system doesn’t give them what they need.

Good brand guidelines can tell people how to use a logo, which colors to choose, and which typefaces to use in which scenarios, but that only gets you so far. Templates, presentation layouts, social graphics, email elements, photography guidance, and ready-to-use assets are what make brand compliance easier than finding the long way around.

Think about Sharon and those notebooks. If she has to dig through a forty-page brand guide, find the approved logo, track down the correct files, and then figure out how to update the order design herself, simply clicking “reorder” on the file with the old logo might simply be the path of least resistance. An excellent nonprofit branding strategy anticipates the work people actually need to do and gives them a clear starting point to do it. 

(If your team doesn’t have the hours or expertise to build all of that, you should consider a brand partnership with Amenable.)

They don’t like the brand itself.

If you’re confident that your staff know how to use the guidelines, have access to all the templates their hearts could desire, and yet are still choosing to go rogue, your problem lies with the brand itself. The good news is that your staff may already be telling you where your nonprofit branding strategy needs to grow—every workaround is a small piece of user feedback.

For example, if your brand guidelines only include two officially approved brand colors, can you really be surprised when someone reaches for a third? If the official typeface is hard to read at small sizes, the official logo files are pixelated, and the official templates are outdated, your staff will find their own well-intentioned ways to make their work more relevant to the audience in front of them.

If you’re ready to figure out whether your brand needs a little maintenance or something more substantial, download our free resource, Is Your Brand Broken or Just Old, to take the brand health diagnostic.

Download the guide to keep reading.