As regular readers of this blog know, I grieve over the amount of time and money nonprofits spend on (re)creating their brochures and tweaking their logos.
Brochures? Not transformational.
Logos? Not transformational.
Coaching your champions? Priceless.
So in an effort to help us all spend less time and money on the former and more on the latter, I share with you (totally unsolicited–this is not a sponsored post; just a clarion call for cheapness) a logo creation site with a bit of a P/E/O twist:
Here’s the way it works:
- You fill out a logo questionnaire.
- You set a prize amount of your choosing for the winning design and a time limit for the contest.
- Designers submit their logo ideas.
- You provide feedback and rank the logos designers are submitting.
- Designers incorporate your feedback and send more logos.
- You choose the one you want and download the file in a usable format with full ownership of the logo.
- Your champions don’t notice the logo change, despite your repeated efforts to try to casually work it into conversations. Then they say, “Huh… What was wrong with the old logo again?”
We’re not looking to replace our present logo at Mission Increase Foundation, but we decided to test the process out of the wellspring of great love we feel for you (which, loosely translated, means, “Please don’t spend $15,000 on a logo that really is no better than the one you have. Instead, spend $250 on a logo that really is no better than the one you have”).
The results we received were about on par with the results we’ve received with $15,000 logo designers (sans that style sheet usage template thingie logo designers like to supply for only a few thousand dollars more). I’m not sure how long the link to our contest will stay active on the site, but you can try clicking here and seeing if you can still get to the page. If not, there are dozens of other logo contests underway on the site that you can see.
The minimum prize amount you can offer is $250, which is returned to you if the contest fails to generates at least 30 entries. We offered a prize of $300 and got 73 entries, only a few of which looked like they were drawn by me.
I truly don’t know these Logo Tournament folks at all, so please don’t consider this an endorsement. What I do know is that anything I can do to tempt you to spend less time and money on your collateral material and more time and money coaching your champions is well worth a post.
Besides, the participatory framework of the site might make it easier for you to solicit your champions’ thoughts during the logo creation process, thoughts like, “Are you sure this is the best way to spend the time and money I would like to invest in the cause through you?”
Do the Word 