Boost Your Nonprofit's Credibility with Legal eSignature Solutions in India

How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimacy for Nonprofit in India

Are you ready to start a non-profit but you're struggling to pick a great name for your organization? Picking the right name can make a bigger difference than you might think! In this video, I'm going to share some of the early mistakes i made picking a name for the non-profit organization i started and also some strategies for making sure that your name aligns with the brand and mission that you are setting out to achieve. Welcome back! My name once again is Amber Melanie Smith, and I make these videos here on youtube to help aspiring change makers with tips and strategies to help you change the world and live a life of impact and purpose! So when I first started a non-profit many years ago we literally picked our name by searching through a thesaurus and choosing some words that seemed like they embodied what we were all about - and then making an acronym out of it. That name was ME3. It stood for "motivate educate empower and engage" and it was supposed to embody our mission of inspiring people to get involved in their communities. But we soon realized every time we talked to someone, they were saying it wrong, spelling it wrong, the news was getting it wrong, people couldn't remember what all those letters stood for, and when they looked at our name, they didn't really understand what we did as an organization. And it might seem like a small deal, but the fact is that name choice had a ripple effect across everything else we were trying to accomplish. Not understanding us quickly and easily meant that we were having a hard time rallying the support that we needed to push our mission forward. So like i said picking a great name for your organization is possibly more important than you realized. So in this video first i'm going to share a process that me and my team used to come up with a new name for the organization and i'll share a little bit about what that new name is later on in this video if you're curious. I'll share about this process why i think it was effective for us and could work for you, and then second, I will talk through a checklist of things you want to make sure that your nonprofit name has going for it to maximize public understanding and support so when we finally some years later got around to changing our organization's name we did it through a special process and we finally landed on a name that we still use today and that people really tell us that they love they get what we're about they love the energy around the name and it really captures our brand personality so here's what we did when my board and i decided it was time to come up with a new name because our old name just was not serving our mission as effectively as we would have liked it to we sat down together and every board member was charged with coming up with a list of five to ten ideas for a new name that they felt embodied what we were all about based on their experiences with our mission and their work then we tested out these new names with our friends with our community partners and got feedback on our ideas finally we all came back together as a team crossed off the ones that were not going to work for us on everyone's list and came up with a short list of names that we thought could be great candidates for our new brand picked a name and went with it and had much more success after that the simple act changing our name quickly had an impact on our operations people understood what we were about and they were excited to support us not only do i think this process was effective because it brought a lot of different ideas to the table for a new name and brought a bunch of perspectives through our board members but it also allowed a whole team to be engaged in the process of picking our new name which was really inspiring to everyone and motivated them to continue our work even more so now that i've talked through the process we went through to rebrand our organization i'm gonna get into part two of this video which is a checklist for all of the things a great non-profit name has going for it first on this list is a technical issue you want to make sure that your name is not taken by another organization especially one in your area or with a similar mission there's legal reasons to not have someone else's copyrighted name and there's also ethical and marketing reasons not to do this the second tip is to avoid using an actual person's name in the name of the organization you do see some organizations named after celebrities or past policy makers etc and the obvious reason is you want to maintain their legacy through the name of this organization but the downside of it would be one if someone does not know who that is um it could lead to some confusion about what the organization does and two heaven forbid something happens with that person maybe there's a scandal attached to their name there are some cases and nonprofits that are like this then you have this position where your mission is attached to a scandal and that's just no good third you want to make sure that the name is not too long and this is for obvious reasons you want it to be easy to remember and being easy to remember is actually checklist item number four if you're not sure if a name idea that you have is easy to remember try putting it out there ask your friends for feedback and then ask them in another week if they remember the name checklist item number five is to avoid acronyms and some older non-profits in especially in the us get away with this because at this point they're well established they've been around a long time they might be a household name so people know who they are the acronym isn't hurting them much but if you're a new non-profit then an acronym is just another barrier to people understanding what you are about um and what you do now an exception might be if you have a really super cool acronym that also spells out a word that also embodies what your organization is all about then you might have some cool branding things you can do there number six is that your name is easy to spell and say this was one of the big issues with my organization's old name me3 it was not actually as intuitively easy to spell as you think because on top of having this name we also decided that we needed the three to be um a superscript so it was like m e cubed and so then do you even know how to find the cubed symbol on a keyboard i i can't remember uh if there was some way to do it but it was just the biggest pain and so we inflicted that upon others trying to get them to write our name correctly it was just not good tip number seven the web domain of the exact spelling that you were trying to use for the name of your organization is available that's something you want to check before you decide on a name having your web domain match your name of the organization just adds to its memorability so it's really easy to find you if i know that your organization's name is crafts for kids and i type in craftsforkids.org and i find you that's a good thing you want to be easy to find now if you change the four and crafts for kids to the number four then you're just adding another slight barrier to people finding you and remembering how to uh locate you online number eight is related to number seven and that is that you also want to make sure that your social media handles ideally with the same spelling as your organization are available and that you can get those before you finalize the name for your organization for the same reasons that it's important to have a web domain that matches your name and the organization spelling of the name and that is easy to find easy to remember the ninth item on the checklist which is a really great tip is that your name can help you think of some creative branding opportunities around the name itself ideally using some kind of symbolism that is not trademarked elsewhere and the tenth most important factor for deciding your new name as an organization is that the name aligns with or at least alludes to the mission of your organization whether it's what you do or who you help there are some great examples out there one of them is donors choose this is an organization that lets their donors choose where to donate money to classrooms and schools around the country to help teachers cover their equipment and supply needs for school another one is doctors without borders you kind of get what they do from the name right they provide medical and humanitarian aid to countries around the world another great example teach for america this is an organization that recruits teachers to bolster public schools also all of them are easy to say easy to spell and to my knowledge got the social media handles and domain names that matched their organization's name for you creative types coming up with a name for your organization might be a really really fun exercise and for some it might be a very stressful organ exercise but hopefully this video and this checklist has helped you think through some of the best strategies out there for coming up with a name that's going to serve your cause well and ultimately that is why you're starting an organization is to help people in the community to make a difference and to meet that mission so i want to hear from you are you in the process of trying to identify a great name for your organization what are your challenges what's exciting to you share your ideas and your thoughts in the comments below that's all i got for you today don't forget to check out the rest of the videos on my channel that are all about starting a non-profit running a non-profit leadership leadership social impact and more please like this video share with your friends and subscribe to my channel so i can keep growing this great community of change makers and finally if you are on facebook don't forget to check out my facebook group called change the world or bust where myself and other change makers are having some great conversations thank you so much see you next time