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How Brand Powers Your Employee Retention & Acquisition Prowess

Posted by on March 22nd, 2022
Posted in Blog, Nonprofit Branding   

What does the Great Resignation have to do with your organization’s brand? If finding and keeping great employees matters to your success there’s nothing more important than the brand – or reputation – that employees evaluate when deciding to join or stay with you. Smart nonprofits, foundations and schools know that their brand is an important tool needed to engage all types of supporters – including loyal staff and volunteers.

Employee Acquisition 

Brand is a powerful acquisition tool. So including “potential employees” among your most important stakeholders when developing your brand strategy is a must. When a potential new hire notices you and your colleagues consistently articulating what you stand for and why it matters, she can be confident she’s joining an organization with a clearly defined culture.

If you’re not sure what your brand strategy is, talk about your values as a way to define your culture. What are the cultural touchstones of your organization?

My dental practice has values, and I see them come to life every visit. They are listed everywhere in the office. Believe it or not, one of their values is “Joy.” If you’re interviewing at several dental practices, wouldn’t you want to work in the office that articulates and demonstrates its desire for joy?

Employee Retention

Living your brand daily leads to employee retention – keeping great employees. My dentist’s office is a happy place – it’s clear people love working there. Turnover is low.

One of Mission Minded’s client’s uses her brand as an empowerment and retention tool:

“At our new employee training, we empower every single person to ensure our brand experience becomes the client’s experience with our organization. They are encouraged to know how we want our stakeholders to feel, and how to bring it to life in their jobs.”

This clear-thinking, brave CEO is committed to her healthcare organization’s refreshed brand. After years of being seen as a “clinic of last resort,” she was determined to infuse the forward-thinking, energized organization’s brand directly into every single employee’s job, every day.

When you use brand as a yardstick of measurement and a rallying cry, you remind your employees of the unique assets of your organization, and you engage them in making the brand come to life in their own work. That’s empowering for your brand and your employees.

At Mission Minded one of our values is to Champion Each Other. We admire, trust, and support each other. From the drawing board to the presentation room, we believe in and advocate for each other. We rev each other up, because we’re in this wonderful work of amplifying the good together. This value easily becomes a brand lens through which to think about employee development. And because we have this value articulated and codified in our culture, everyone who works here knows what it means to them and their career here.

Ultimately, when you engage in brand work, you embark on a journey of uncovering and amplifying your organization’s best assets: celebrating what you do really well and why that matters. It reminds your employees why they wanted to work with you in the first place. And that’s the best employee retention tool there is.

Whether you already have a strong brand or need help clarifying and amplifying your organization’s brand, we’ve got lots of great resources to help. When you create and leverage the right brand strategy you’ll attract, delight and retain the employees that fuel your mission.

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Sarah R. Moore, our Director of Brand Strategy, joined Mission Minded from a career that has spanned both the private and nonprofit sector.

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