Personality attracts your people. Two organisations working on the same cause can — and should — have completely different personalities. The Shitbox Rally and a traditional cancer research gala both raise money for cancer, but they appeal to entirely different supporters. Neither is wrong. Your personality is a filter: it attracts the people who resonate with who you are and gently repels the ones who don’t. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Think about where your organisation sits on these spectrums:
- Formal ←→ Casual
- Serious ←→ Playful
- Traditional ←→ Innovative
- Authoritative ←→ Collaborative
- Restrained ←→ Passionate
There are no right answers. A palliative care organisation will sit somewhere very different from a youth arts collective, and both are appropriate. The point is to choose deliberately rather than defaulting to bland.
There are two ways to approach this. You can start from who you genuinely are — define your personality and see who it attracts. Or you can start from who you want to reach — identify an underserved audience and craft a personality that speaks to them. Both work. The first is more authentic and easier to sustain. The second is more strategic and can help a new organisation find its niche quickly. Either way, the personality needs to be something your team can actually live — if it feels forced internally, it’ll read as forced externally.
Make it practical. Brand personality isn’t just a strategy document — it shows up in the photos you choose, the words you use, the events you run, and how you respond on social media. If your personality is warm and community-driven, a formal media release written in third person is going to feel off. If you’re a respected research body, an emoji-heavy Instagram caption might undermine your credibility.
In our experience, the nonprofits that struggle most with brand consistency aren’t the ones with bad brands — they’re the ones that haven’t agreed on a personality. When everyone’s guessing, you get a different brand from every staff member.
