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Four Tips for Nonprofit Name Change Success

Legal Momentum's (LM) name change was a grand success. If you missed THIS case study, take a look now at:
http://nancyschwartz.com/nonprofit_name_change.html

LM's Vice President of Communications, Maureen McFadden, shares these four tips to ensure the same success for your nonprofit:
  1. Dedicate Yourself.
    Dedicate yourself to a long-term process for the name change. Be prepared for the process to become emotionally exhausting at certain points (names, like design, trigger emotional response).


  2. Include Staff, Board Members and Stakeholders.
    Be inclusive in a way that contributes to the name change process. Beware -- when the going gets rough, the knee-jerk response is to pull back and become very secretive. But this is the point at which it's especially critical to keep the dialogue going.


  3. Research Other Name Changes.
    McFadden recalls one of the most useful steps in LM's name change process was to survey other nonprofit organizations that had recently changed their names. She asked:
    • Why did you do it?
    • What kind of problems did you run into?
    • What steps or techniques were particularly successful?

  4. Stay Focused On Why You Decided to Change the Name.
    You'll find that you (and your colleagues and external audiences) are more attached to your organizations current name than you knew. According to McFadden, "the moving on is emotional, the acceptance is intellectual."

    The antidote? McFadden advises you to "stay focused on why you implemented the change and what it will help your organization achieve."



© 2002-2008 Nancy E. Schwartz. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Nancy E. Schwartz helps nonprofits succeed through effective marketing and communications. As President of Nancy Schwartz & Company (www.nancyschwartz.com), Nancy and her team provide marketing planning and implementation services to organizations as varied as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, and Wake County (NC) Health Services.

Subscribe to her free e-newsletter "Getting Attention", (http://www.nancyschwartz.com/getting_attention.html) and read her blog at http://www.gettingattention.org for more insights, ideas and great tips on attracting the attention your organization deserves.

NOTE: You're welcome to "reprint" this article online as long as it remains complete and unaltered (including the copyright and "about the author" info at the end), and you send a copy of your reprint.


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Revised April 12, 2008

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