Benefits and qualities of groups in human services

Beyond Branding: Van Riel and Fombrun’s Corporate Communication Theory in the Human Services Sector Craig T. Maier

Amidst funding cuts, increasing competition, and growing demands for service, non- profit human services organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of marketing communication, especially branding. However, Van Riel and Fombrun’s (2007) corporate communication theory suggests that focusing too intently on branding may actually weaken these organizations over the long term. Drawing on a series of focus groups with a cohort of human services nonprofits, this study extends Van Riel and Fombrun’s theory into the nonprofit context and reveals the importance of a balanced approach to nonprofit corporate communication.

Keywords: Branding; Corporate Communication; Human Services; Marketing Com- munication; Nonprofit Organizations

Human services organizations—homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, food banks, senior services centers, substance abuse programs, and others—accounted for 34.8% of American nonprofits in 2011 and represent an important part of the country’s social safety net (Pettijohn, 2013). Fifteen years ago, Kearns (2000) noted that throughout the 20th century, these organizations thrived in an environment of relative stability, little or no competition, and plentiful funding from government agencies and foundations. Kearns saw that this moment was quickly coming to an end, however, and argued that nonprofits needed to articulate a clear mission and identity, differentiate themselves in the marketplace, diversify their revenue streams, and demonstrate their value to society. Today, amidst deep funding cuts and sharp

Craig T. Maier (PhD, Duquesne University, 2008) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University, 340 College Hall, 600 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15282. E-mail: [email protected]

Qualitative Research Reports in Communication Vol. 17, No. 1, 2016, pp. 27–35

ISSN 1745-9435 (print)/ISSN 1745-9443 (online) © 2016 Eastern Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/17459435.2015.1088892

increases in social needs (National Council of Nonprofits, 2013), growing competition from venture philanthropists and social entrepreneurs (Grønberg, 2001), and chan- ging expectations regarding what nonprofits can and should do (Carson, 2002), Kearns’s advice is increasingly urgent. Now, more than ever, human services non- profits must communicate well.

In response to these challenges, writers on nonprofit communication have often highlighted marketing communication, with a special emphasis on branding strate- gies. Researchers have discussed how strong brands contribute to nonprofits’ organi- zational performance (Kylander & Stone, 2012; Liu, Chapleo, Ko, & Ngugi, 2013), the brand personalities of nonprofit organizations (Aaker, Vohs, & Mogilner, 2010; Sargeant, Ford, & Hudson, 2008; Stebbins and Hartmann, 2013), the role of brands in fundraising (Hou, Du, & Tian, 2009), and the pragmatics of brand building (Griffiths, 2005; Jenkinson, Sain, & Bishop, 2005; Laidler-Kylander & Simonin, 2009). While Stride (2006) has cautioned against this focus on nonprofit branding, these writers remind us that marketing communication remains essential for survival in a competitive, resource-poor environment.

Yet, Van Riel and Fombrun (2007) have argued that emphasizing branding in isolation from other communication concerns is also potentially dangerous. They proposed that branding is actually the middle stage in a complex corporate communication process that begins with identity development and ends with reputation management. They theorized that organizations without a strong sense of identity struggle to develop a coherent brand and find it impossible to establish and defend a robust reputation over the long term. They concluded that marketing must be balanced with equally strong efforts in managerial and internal communication that strengthen organizations from within and public relations activities that grow organizations’ reputations among corporate, community, and govern- mental stakeholders. Although Van Riel and Fombrun (2007) were interested almost exclusively in for-profit companies, their theory of corporate communication suggests that nonprofits, too, need to succeed in all three areas, and that focusing on one (branding) while ignoring the others (identity and reputation) may actually be weakening these organizations instead of strengthening them.

Using a focus group methodology, this study examines the implications of Van Riel and Fombrun’s theory in the context of nonprofit human services organizations. It explores two questions:

RQ1: What communication issues do nonprofit human service organizations face? RQ2: How can these experiences extend Van Riel and Fombrun’s theory into the

nonprofit context?

Method

Participants

With the assistance of The Forbes Funds, a foundation dedicated to improving the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations, an email invitation was sent to all human

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service nonprofits headquartered in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Nine organiza- tions agreed to participate. These organizations, whose budgets ranged from just under $1,000,000 to over $30,000,000, represented a diverse mix of missions: One offered transportation services to indigent persons, one delivered a broad portfolio of faith-based social services, one provided employment services for persons with dis- abilities, one worked with homeless children, one supported mentoring programs for youth, two served victims of domestic violence and child abuse, and two provided an array of support services to young people. Six organizations sent their most senior communication staff member, while three sent their executive directors.

Procedure

Over 4 months, the representatives from the participating organizations took part in three, 2-hour focus groups. During the first, participants discussed what they believed to be their most important communication issues. Because of scheduling problems, this session was divided into two sections, both of which raised similar concerns. After this first meeting, participants completed a self-assessment of their communication activities, and a second survey was sent to key stakeholders whom participants identified as being able to give an external evaluation of their communication pro- grams. Though these instruments did not generate enough data to draw any definitive conclusions, they highlighted potential problem areas and helped participants com- pare their communication program with the efforts of their peers.

The self-assessment and external stakeholder surveys provided discussion points for the second focus group, which occurred 1 month after the first and allowed participants to refine their understandings of their communication problems. At the conclusion of the second meeting, participants set goals for improving their commu- nication programs in advance of the third and final focus group, which took place three months later. During this final session, participants discussed their experiences and ways of overcoming the obstacles they encountered. Prior to the final focus group, one of participants left the project for unspecified reasons.

Detailed notes were taken throughout. Two participants who could not attend the final session because of unexpected conflicts contributed their responses to the focus group questions via email prompts, which were then incorporated into the analysis.

Results

Focus Group One: Complexity, Conflict, and “Mission Creep”

While the participants all cited developing a strong brand as their most important communication objective, they also reported that organizational complexity was complicating their efforts in achieving this goal. As Grønberg (2001) has observed, organic and unplanned growth has always characterized the American nonprofit sector, and all of the participating organizations had multiple programs that evolved over time to meet changing community needs or the shifting priorities of funders.

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Indeed, one of the participating organizations operated 25 programs distributed over six counties, including food banks, adoption services, counseling services, pregnancy and parenting programs, refugee resettlement initiatives, senior services, and a free health care clinic. The executive director reported that the stresses of navigating these multiple programs and constituencies often made it difficult, and at times impossible, for her organization to develop a coherent brand.

Though the other participants did not experience this problem to the same degree, many linked programmatic complexity to unaddressed managerial and internal com- munication problems. Because communication had often been a low priority in the past, communication activities had been delegated to individual program units, resulting in duplication of efforts, messaging inconsistencies, and internal “turf wars” that wasted time and energy. Echoing Kylander and Stone (2012), they reported that program units used to operating independently resisted communication strategies that they believed had been imposed from above. For some, these lingering conflicts were actually complicating service delivery: One participant reported difficulties with a key staff member who, despite frequent correction, persisted in pronouncing the organization’s name incorrectly in a way that confused clients and external audiences.

Alongside these problems, participants described a sense of “mission creep” (Kearns, 2000, p. 155) that was further diluting their efforts. While all of the participants said that their organizations had a sense of mission as evidenced by formal mission and vision statements, many felt that their organizations’ identity— the ongoing awareness and ownership of their organizations’ most central, enduring, and distinguishing attributes (Whetten, 2006)—was, as one participant said, always in danger of “going rogue” with no one to rein it back in. In fact, three of the commu- nication directors in the group said that internal conflict and resistance left them feeling as if they were creating their organizations’ identities as they went along, with or without the official support of their leaders. Lacking a clear organizational focus or mandate from their executive and board leadership, they struggled to define coherent marketing messages.

Focus Group Two: Programmatic and Structural Invisibility

As they reviewed the self-assessment and external stakeholder survey, a question on media relations prompted participants to describe a pervasive sense of invisibility that seemed to surround their organizations. The executive director from the largest orga- nization in the group, which had a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, said few people outside of a handful of foundations and government agencies knew what his organization did or that it even existed. While this comment at first seemed to suggest a significant but rather straightforward reputation management problem, the resulting discussion revealed deeper complexities. In fact, many participants reported that remaining hidden was often an essential part of their organizations’ operations.

Sometimes, invisibility was programmatic. Some organizations in the group served as intermediaries or filled gaps in much larger programs, so their role and contributions

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were often obscured. For example, one of the participating organizations provided transportation services to people in need. Sometimes, this involved helping women fleeing domestic violence, while in others, it meant providing bus passes to a local hospital so poor pregnant women could travel to their prenatal appointments. In the first case, the situation was often so urgent that the women never learned who helped them. In the second, the bus pass program fit so seamlessly into hospital’s daily routine that no one, not even the social workers distributing the passes, knew who was involved. The executive director of the largest organization corroborated this concern. The social safety net, he argued, was so complex and responsibilities distributed among so many different partners that it was often impossible for individual agencies to claim credit for their efforts. Some participants said that their organizations once took pride in being anonymous “guardian angels.” While they recognized that this altruistic decision was now self-defeating, participants suggested that taking a more assertive approach to reputation management was easier said than done.

Alongside this programmatic invisibility, participants said that invisibility could also be strategic, in that some organizations believed they needed to remain hidden in order to fulfill their missions. The communication director of a domestic violence shelter reported that confidentiality was essential in order to protect the safety of her organization’s clients. The need for secrecy influenced everything from the organiza- tion’s marketing collateral to its main facility: a massive building that purposefully revealed nothing about its intended purpose. Similarly, a participant from another organization that provided services to homeless children said her organization’s leadership had made a conscious decision to conceal the organization’s name from the youth they helped because they did not want the children to feel stigmatized any more than they already were. Again, both participants admitted that the strategic decision to remain hidden made it difficult to establish a strong reputation, but they also believed that this choice was essential for the welfare of the people they served.

These struggles are not unique. Lune’s (2002) research on needle exchange pro- grams revealed that many human services nonprofits, especially those working with despised or marginalized communities, need to work in the shadows and experience difficulties when trying to make their case to more “respectable” elements of society. Lune found that while communication campaigns raised organizations’ profiles, too much notoriety inhibited efforts to reach out to constituencies that preferred to remain hidden. Also, by revealing themselves as “good” organizations helping “bad” people, agencies often unintentionally perpetuated negative stereotypes of the popula- tions they were trying to serve. Reputation-building activities thus presented what could be called a paradox of invisibility, in which the need for self-promotion is constantly at odds with an equally strong need to remain unseen.

Focus Group Three: Professionalism

At the end of the second session, participants established goals for improving their communication programs. During the final focus group three months later, they

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discussed the results of their efforts. The discussion focused on two levels of messa- ging that participants perceived as being in tension with each other: generalized messaging necessary to communicate their overall mission and specialized messaging necessary to promote individual programs. Both levels of messaging were understood to be essential: Generalized messaging, one participant said, “paves the road” for specialized messaging by articulating a theme that ties the agency’s programs together, while specialized messaging puts a human face on these programs. Still, two partici- pants reported that internal conflict and lack of managerial direction had once again foiled attempts to create compelling messaging. In both cases, staff and board mem- bers had, as one participant put it, fallen so deeply “in love” with particular programs that they could not see the organization as a whole, and their resistance made attempts to define generalized messaging impossible. Again, participants confirmed Kylander and Stone’s (2012) observation that marketing communication and conflict management often go hand-in-hand in nonprofits and Van Riel and Fombrun’s (2007) point that organizations need to get their own house in order before they can think about reaching out to others.

Participants observed that nonprofit communication professionals were only begin- ning to be able to influence these issues. One participant, for instance, said the previous communication specialist in her organization was an office manager with no knowledge of the field other than an interest in social media, and she said that it took time to persuade her colleagues to follow a more structured approach. A major milestone, she said, occurred when the executive director, for whom she had always ghostwritten, allowed her to put her own name on official correspondence. Another participant relayed similar experiences, saying that it took time before his executive director trusted him enough to allow him to contact board members on his own. While lack of experience played a role in both cases, and while the other participants said that the landscape was changing rapidly in nonprofits, they also agreed that these stories were not unique. The communication professionals in the group recognized that they needed to broaden their expertise beyond marketing in order to influence broader organizational conversations that lay outside their direct responsibilities but nevertheless affected their work.

Discussion

This study explores Van Riel and Fombrun’s (2007) theory of corporate communica- tion within the context of nonprofit human services organizations. Van Riel and Fombrun argued that marketing and branding make sense only when understood within the context of a balanced corporate communication program that also includes efforts to strengthen an organization’s sense of identity and build its reputation among its stakeholders. Their theory suggests that organizations that emphasize brand at the expense of identity and reputation will struggle to develop excellent communication programs, and the experiences of the organizations in the study group supported this line of thinking. Despite their attempts to develop strong brands, the participants

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recognized that unresolved internal conflicts and mission creep were undermining their efforts, and struggles with programmatic and strategic invisibility made it impossible to establish the reputation they believed their organizations deserved.

Still, participants recognized that it was often hard to look beyond branding. They were under tremendous pressure to promote programs and raise revenue, and as one participant observed, topics like branding are typically perceived as “fun,” in that they often involve off-site retreats that produce shiny logos and punchy messaging strategies. Yet, she argued that these activities often distracted from the much harder work of contending with deeper organizational problems that compli- cate effective communication planning. For practitioners like her, Van Riel and Fombrun’s (2007) work seems vital because it broadens practitioners’ theoretical vision and helps them make their case for the authority and resources necessary to contribute to broader organizational discussions involving mission creep, internal conflict, and organizational invisibility and to develop the balanced communication programs their organizations require.

This study also opens four new avenues of inquiry into Van Riel and Fombrun’s (2007) theory, which focuses on the needs of large for-profit enterprises. First, the discussion revealed that human services agencies tasked with addressing complex social problems could deal with identity development and mission creep much differently than for-profits oriented solely toward maximizing profits, and Van Riel and Fombrun’s theory ignores these pressures. Second, the persistent internal conflicts within these organizations indicated that nonprofits might require a much more nuanced approach to conflict management than Van Riel and Fombrun’s theory seems to presume. Third, these organization’s struggles with the “paradox of invisi- bility” suggested that more attention should be paid to the complexities of reputation management in human services nonprofits. Finally, tight budgets in human services nonprofits may make it difficult to design and execute the balanced corporate com- munication programs that Van Riel and Fombrun’s theory recommends, and so additional reflection appears necessary to help these organizations achieve maximum results with limited means. Each of these areas highlights the tensions that make nonprofit work so challenging and offers opportunities to extend Van Riel and Fombrun’s theory into nonprofit corporate communication.

Limitations

This study had several limitations that can set the stage for future research. Obviously, additional focus groups with more organizations in other regions of the country are necessary for a more complete picture of human services non- profits’ communication issues. In addition, because these organizations are so diverse, research examining the communication challenges of specific types of nonprofits (e.g., domestic violence shelters) will be important to reveal any differ- ences within the sector. Finally, the organizations participating in this study were atypically large for a region where as many as two thirds of all nonprofits have

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budgets of less than $100,000 (Dietrich, Briem, Collins, & Xie, 2008). Small, resource-poor organizations undoubtedly face communication challenges that are quite different than their larger peers and have far fewer resources to address those problems. Additional research is therefore required to explore these organizations’ problems and help to overcome them.

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