Toni Pergolin had heard her organization’s name was confusing. As she thought about that, she realized she never heard people use the tagline. She never used it. And the logo — the logo was a decade old.
Pergolin, president and CEO of then Bancroft NeuroHealth, realized all signs pointed to rebranding.
The nonprofit came out of the process with the simplified name of Bancroft and a tagline of “One World. For Everyone.” Part of the success, Pergolin says, is due to the involvement of employees in the rebranding effort. From start to finish, they were asked their opinions.
“We had an open-door policy, and we encouraged people to speak up about it. Ask questions: Did it resonate with them? Is it powerful? Is it meaningful to them?” Pergolin says of the follow-up after the unveiling. “It was really educating, having them be a part of the process and then allowing them to give feedback.”
In 2009, Bancroft had a $95 million budget and 1,950 employees.
Smart Business spoke with Pergolin about how to involve employees in rebranding.
Educate your employees. We went out with the thought in mind that we have to educate them to make sure that they understand the vision of the organization and why it’s so important to them, why our mission is important to them. And what they do every day relates — how that links back — to everything that we do here. So the first thing we did was really educate them.
I think it’s important [that] it’s face to face. What we tried to do was link what they do every day, how they make a difference, to the end result. It’s different for every position and every program, so I think it was important that we could talk to the AP clerks and say, ‘Here’s what you do, and that’s why you make our organization better.’ We could talk to teachers and say, ‘Here’s what you do, and that’s what your link to the organization is.’
I continue to do that. Every time I speak within the organization, I always try to give an example of something that just happened last week or somebody needs this ‘One world. For everyone’ just to keep them very involved.
Be the one to educate. We went through a lot of discussion about it, and we did think it was important that the CEO went out because then you knew it was important to me.
It shows if it’s something that I would put time and energy into, that I think it’s important enough to spend my time on, then it certainly should be something that they should think is important enough for them to spend their time on.
I think that’s a key point. If they hear about it (from somewhere else), I think it’s an easy thing for rumors to start around, ‘Why are they doing this; why are they doing (that)?’
We didn’t really allow for any of that. We were very clear. We were excited about it. It wasn’t because we were trying to hide anything. It was very clear from the beginning what our focus was and why we were doing it.
