Keep them usable. The most effective brand guidelines we’ve seen are short, visual, and practical. A 60-page PDF that nobody opens is worth less than a 6-page document that everyone actually uses. Focus on the decisions that come up most often: logo usage, colour codes, font choices, voice examples, and a few “do and don’t” visual comparisons.
Make them accessible. Store your guidelines somewhere your whole team can reach — a shared drive, your intranet, a simple web page. Include downloadable assets: logo files in every format, colour swatches, templates for common documents. The harder it is to find the right logo file, the more likely someone will use the wrong one.
Templates are your friend. Create templates for the things your team produces most often — social media posts, email headers, event flyers, presentation decks and reports. Templates do more for brand consistency than guidelines ever can, because they bake the right decisions in rather than asking people to remember them.
Brand isn’t set and forget. Review your guidelines annually. Not a full rebrand — just a check that the guidelines still reflect how you’re actually communicating. New channels appear, teams change, and the way you talk about your work evolves. Guidelines that were written five years ago and never updated are guidelines in name only.
A note on governance. Decide who “owns” the brand in your organisation — who has authority to approve new materials, who can sign off on exceptions, and who’s responsible for keeping the guidelines current. In small nonprofits this might be one person; in larger ones it might be a small team. Either way, make it explicit. Brand consistency breaks down not because people don’t care, but because nobody’s job is to maintain it.
