3 Must-Haves in Your Brand Guide

A comprehensive brand guide is essential for ensuring your organization communicates effectively. In the nonprofit sector, effective branding is key to building trust, fostering engagement, and driving donations. 

We understand that for smaller organizations, creating a comprehensive brand guide can feel challenging, as limited resources often lead to shorter guidelines that don’t fully cover all aspects of your brand. With less budget, time, and team capacity, expanding a brand guide can feel overwhelming. That’s where we come in. To help, we’ve narrowed down three essential elements that will add meaning and consistency to your brand, regardless of your organization’s scale.

Brand Strategy — the why

Brand strategy is a critical piece that’s often overlooked in brand guidelines, especially for smaller organizations. A well-crafted brand strategy is the foundation of all other aspects of your brand, and will help everyone (from your staff to your target audience) understand who you are, and why you do what you do.

Your brand strategy should encompass the essence of your organization — including your core values, mission, and unique personality. It will influence everything from messaging to visual identity. 

Without a clear brand strategy, your guidelines may end up as a collection of visual design choices rather than a cohesive representation of what you stand for. This can lead to inconsistent messaging and a diluted identity, making it harder for stakeholders to connect on an emotional level. By starting with brand strategy in your guidelines, you can ensure that your visual identity authentically reflects your purpose, mission and values, and ultimately, resonates with your audience in a real way.

Things to include: Brand Story, Core Values, Mission, Purpose, Vision, Voice and Tone

Visual Identity — the look

When most people think of brand guidelines, it’s usually the visual identity that comes to mind. Your visual identity is the look and feel of your brand,  it’s the visual expression of all the hard work you’ve just put into crafting your brand strategy. This includes all the building blocks of your brand — logo guidelines, colour choices, font styles, etc. The list goes on.

Having an extremely detailed guide for all these elements is critical for achieving consistency across your materials — whether on social media, your website, or in print. Without comprehensive guidelines and rules in place, you risk having an inconsistent look and feel to your brand that will confuse your audience and in the long run lead to a lack of trust.

Things to include: Logo Usage, Colour Palette, Typography, Iconography, Photography Style

A well-crafted brand strategy will help everyone understand who you are, and why you do what you do.

— Mikey Bacque, Lead Designer

Brand Application — the execution

So, your brand strategy and visual identity are in place — now what? You might think this covers everything you need. What’s missing now is how everything comes together and is actually shown to the world. 

It’s good practice for your brand guide to include examples of how your brand looks in the real world — you can use mockups to showcase your visual identity and inspire the designers who are working with your brand. If you don’t have guides in place for all your collateral — you may be leaving too much room for interpretation which opens the opportunity for inconsistency.

Things to include: Digital and Print Mockups, Layouts for Presentations and Reports, Digital and Social Media Guidelines, Accessibility Standards

Have questions about brand guidelines? Let’s chat.