Stop. Branding.
An argument for social justice movements to be better by resisting the urge to brand better.
For 14 years the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training organized a biannual conference, Money for Our Movements (MFOM). It was the largest and only national gathering of social justice fundraisers. At each conference, planners chose a topic relevant to grassroots organizers and fundraisers and selected a team of debaters to argue all sides of the issue. The remarks below are from the 2018 MFOM Great Debate where Mario Lugay and Erica Clemmons were assigned to argued in the affirmative of the debate’s resolution.
This piece was originally commissioned for the Fall ’18 edition of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal.
Debate Resolution — “Organizations that are explicitly working for social justice and see their work as part of a broader strategy of building strong social justice movements must be clear that branding is a tool in a capitalist system, which itself can only produce more inequality and oppression, and as such social justice organizations must resist the pressure to create or promote their own brand.”
Opening Remarks
Thank you. I’m so grateful to be here with so many beautiful, inspiring people, who are part of such beautiful and inspiring movements.
I worry a lot these days.
I worry about who we are as individuals and who we are with each other. I worry about a loss of connectedness, of mutuality, and of any sense of shared fates. I worry about an ethos that seems so very far removed from that spirit of “we all do better, when we all do better.”
I worry about us in this room. And, I worry about our sector. I worry that individualism, competition and scarcity are increasingly infecting our movements — movements that have, in our lifetimes, become more professionalized, with all that that brings about in terms of who sees themselves as part of our movements and who doesn’t, who feels confident in this work and who might believe that they wouldn’t be able to contribute anything meaningful.
I worry that we focus so much on the other side, so much about us relative to the other side, that we lose sight of what’s happening around us. I worry that we’ve lost sight of those people we need and want standing alongside us, that we’ve lose sight of the nourishing that bonds with our allies need, and I worry that we only allow ourselves to see in our world “funders” or “members.”
I worry that we’ve lost sight of that majority of people who fall in neither of those categories, nor have the same privileges, and opportunities, and community that those of us who do this work as our full time jobs have. Because it’s those privileges, opportunities and community that sustains and inspires our own political identities and our political journeys.
I worry that the greatest threat we face isn’t the conservative right, but that larger existential threat of having those people who should be standing alongside us opting out of civic engagement entirely — because of the demands on their lives, because of the allure of consumerism, and because of our choice to engage them, time and again, as generous transactions.
I worry that there are signs and proxies all around us showing us evidence of this threat, but that we ultimately ignore.
While I worry, others have tried to reassure me.
“Look at the outpouring of activism after Trump. Look at the money moved to those well-branded organizations like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Look.”
So, I looked.
And what I saw, worried me even more.
For some background, I was trained in my early days by organizers like Eric Tang and Ai-jen Poo who cared for me. With them, I was part of a group called CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities that was openly and admittedly a political home, guiding and mediating our political journeys, asking us to do more than we thought we were coming to CAAAV to do, more than we realized we even had the capability to do. CAAAV helped so many of us understand why things were the way they were in our society and our communities, the root causes of the problems in our communities and in the news, and the ways to act together, over time to powerfully affect the world around us.
But what I saw when I looked closely at the uptick in engagement after the election wasn’t this at all. It wasn’t people being guided along their political journeys, being fully invited into our movements. It wasn’t even people being challenged to be more, to feel and understand their full agency.
Rather, today’s engagement resembled, more than I’d like to admit, consumption.
“Here are three calls to make right now! Five places to donate tomorrow! Seven actions you can take next week!”
These weren’t touch points that led to conversations. These weren’t designed with a recognition of what we might already be doing or the range of things that we could bring to this work either today or over the course of our lifetimes. These were emails written to what felt like some impersonal empty and disconnected donor.
And these emails came right alongside corporate emails selling new bluetooth speakers, new sneakers, new music, new movies, new technology and new experiences.
“Bored on a Friday night? Buy tickets to the latest summer blockbuster, in theaters now!”
“Feel bad about Trump separating families on Thursday? Make a quick donation to this organization you recognize from its logo.”
“Feeling a certain way? Here’s how to spend some money to address that feeling and move on.”
While the branding of our nonprofits might look great and better than ever before, in our nonprofits’ branding of themselves, our nonprofits could be confused for corporations more than ever before.
I worry that people are wanting to be supported in who they can be in this world, but instead of supporting, we’re selling. And, I’m worried that our desire to brand comes out of that desire to sell rather than to organize deeply, in challenging, but ultimately transformative ways.
I worry that branding itself is being sold to us, for us to consume as a magic remedy, as snake oil, and that our purchasing of it comes out of a scarcity mindset telling us that to compete with capitalism we have to be more like capitalism. I worry that nonprofits’ new found focus on branding itself is not redress to capitalism, but the direct outcome of it.
I worry that this is all born out of a mindset that instructs us not to appeal to other people’s best selves — looking for authenticity, agency, connection, mutuality, transformative moments in a world of noise — but rather their basest selves — “we have to brand ourselves better because people have short attention spans, because you have to make social justice easy, because they’ll only respond to good visuals.”
I worry that branding our individual organizations is not standing out in the noise, but us standing down — relinquishing the idea that they’ll know us by our work, by our community, by our joy, and instead hope they’ll know us by a logo, in pursuit of that false prophet of power … of being the first place people think of to donate.
But, maybe I worry too much.
Maybe branding isn’t so bad.
This is what I was thinking when I was flying here, preparing for this debate. So on a whim, I took out my phone — and I invite you to do the same right now — opened a browser, and searched for the word “brand.” What popped up hurt:
We’re better than this.
Rather than being known for our “brand,” let us be known for the beautiful, inspiring individuals we are and the beautiful, inspiring movements we are a part of together.
Closing Remarks
Earlier in the debate, I told you what I was worried about. And I do worry a lot. But I’m also very hopeful.
I’m hopeful because being better than a brand is less an impossible task, and more an easy choice we can choose to make, or not.
What if in introducing ourselves, we state, instead of our nonprofit’s tag line or mission statement, which attempts to set ourselves apart from others, we share:
Our name, the name of our organization, and then, rather than more about our individual organization, the movement that our organization is a part of.
What if we did that right here, right now, with the person sitting next to you?
…
Did you feel silenced or limited in leading with our movements rather than your organization? Did it prevent you from sharing more about your organization?
Or did it expand what might come next and how we might connect with each other?
Note: These remarks were crafted for the purpose of taking a single stance in the debate. While there’s a lot here that reflects my own concerns, I do believe branding, for the purposes of creating shared identities and experiences, has a place and value in our social movements.
