Flag Day, the day that our nation officially adopted “Old Glory” to represent it. It symbolizes more than just our country. It represents the freedom we value as Americans. People rally around it, celebrate it and use it to pay tribute to fallen patriots. It’s recognized the world over and has been used for marketing, promotions, merchandising, demonstrations and protests. It evokes emotion whether the viewer loves this country or not.
While I’m not trying to compare your member-based organization with the United States, Flag Day did bring to mind the symbols organizations use to represent themselves. Do you have a logo you embrace that speaks to who you are and what your mission is? Do your members recognize it? Does it evoke a feeling in them when they see it on correspondence? Do they view the logo and immediately think “I need to read this email. It contains important information.”? Or do they see your logo and immediately slide it into a folder to read later? Logos (and branding) indicate “official” correspondence. They make it easy for the human brain to associate a message with the sender before we even know who the sender is. Even when logos are blurred and tag lines are removed, studies have shown that consumers are able to pick out and identify what company or organization they belong to.
Since logos are representations of organizations, this begs a bigger question of how are you perceived by your members? It would be an interesting question to ask them: “What do you do when you see an email (or other correspondence) come in from us? Is it something you read right away or table”
Do you know the answer?
