How do you connect people with your brand online?

How do you connect people with your brand online? Communications professionals met in London last week as part of the regular Brand Breakfast event and examined this topic.

Kirsty Marrins, News and Social Media Executive at Trinity College London attended the event and has written a guest article to share her thoughts with you. She has been working in voluntary sector communications for five years and you can find her on Twitter @LondonKirsty. Over to you Kirsty…

How do you connect people with your brand online?
I attended my first Brand Breakfast last week, which was kindly hosted by Breast Cancer Care. Brand Breakfast is an informal forum where brand managers come together to discuss topics of mutual interest and share examples of best practice.

It’s led by Dan Dufour, Head of Brand at The Good Agency, and Serena Donne, Director at Spencer du Bois, and is facilitated by CharityComms, the professional membership body for charity communicators.

The first speakers were Carly Wilson and Sophie Munro-Faure from Macmillan Cancer Support who talked about the development of the Macmillan brand since its rebrand in 2006 and the be.macmillan website, which allows professionals and supporters to ‘learn’ and ‘make’. They have around 700 cancer information items to download and around 1,000 templates to make posters, tickets, invitations etc for fundraising events. Last year they had 80,000 users who downloaded 70,000 items.

The next and final speaker was Carrie Longton, co-founder of the hugely popular and successful parenting website Mumsnet. Carrie spoke about the company’s evolution since it was conceived in 2000, offered up case studies of how they work in partnership with charities and companies and gave us insight into their members.

If you would like more information about the content of the presentations, you can read my Storify.

As a Communications professional I found both presentations interesting and insightful and here is what I took away from them:

Macmillan presentation
:

  • Be brave and ‘let go’ of your brand
  • Brand is more than just a logo, it is the cornerstone of your identity
  • Create deeper engagement online with your supporters through personalisation

Mumsnet presentation:

  • Word of mouth is still your best marketing tool
  • Don’t be afraid to let your members/supporters own, shape and grow your brand
  • Respect your target audience

The next Brand Breakfast will take place on 13 March and is on Managing Risk and Reputation. For more information on how to attend visit the CharityComms website.

Post author: Kirsty Marrins

Thank you Kirsty for sharing your thoughts from Brand Breakfast. What do you think of her article? You’re welcome to comment below. All of the upcoming CharityComms events have been added to The IC Crowd’s 2013 comms calendar.

Are you attending an event that you think other comms pros would be interested in reading about? If so and you’d like to write a guest article for my blog, please read my guidelines and get in touch, Rachel

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