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Our brand review: the story so far
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9 September 2008
As many of you know, One Parent Families|Gingerbread launched a review of its brand in June, a year after the two organisations merged to create the biggest national charity for single parent families.
With so many government policies poised to affect single parent families over the coming years, and debates about parenting high on the media agenda, the need to build our profile and to communicate clearly has never been greater. We want everyone to know that the combination of One Parent Families' policy and service-delivery expertise with Gingerbread's grass-roots reach makes us, simply, the leading single parent family charity in the UK.
To ensure that our new brand reflects this, we've been working with communications agency Forster and a wide range of stakeholders - including our members, staff and trustees, as well as (thanks to services donated by Populus) opinion leaders, MPs and the general public - to find out what people know about us already, what they think we should be doing and what sort of organisation we should be in the future.
We're at an exciting stage in the process right now, starting to build what we discovered during this research phase into our identity and a brand launch. We'll be able to say more about these in the coming weeks, but for the moment thought we'd share with you the key findings of the research. - We had 841 responses to the online survey in a very short space of time, 77% were single parents, and many put real effort into providing detailed feedback - a good sign of the regard we are held in.
- When asked ‘How do you prefer to describe yourself?', the 594 respondents to this question mainly used the term ‘single parents' (51% of respondents). The next most used term was ‘lone parents' at 19%.
- By far the most mixed response came when we asked about our name. We expected some strong feelings and a range of views but were surprised that no clear trend emerged, except that very few people want us to keep the current merger name One Parent Families|Gingerbread and few thought we should invest in a new name. The survey response was inconclusive, with more respondents preferring Gingerbread to One Parent Families (35% compared to 27%), but also a much higher level of negative perceptions of Gingerbread (19% compared to 9%).
- The opinion poll data however showed that Gingerbread has a very high level of awareness among the general public: when asked if they could name an organisation working with lone parents and their children 19% name Gingerbread, close to none One Parent Families. The name awareness was not matched by understanding of what Gingerbread does. By contrast One Parent Families is a strong established brand with Government, private sector, the media and other NGOs: the associations are positive and understanding of what we do clear.
- The online survey showed very clearly that supporters value our provision of high quality information and our campaigning to change government policy and represent the views and experiences of lone parents. Concerns about the need to defend lone parents, and reduce stigma, and the importance of working on supporting single parents to build their self-esteem and confidence, emerged as strong themes.
We take pride in much of this feedback and have a strong basis now on which to build both the new brand and our future work. We recognise that the decision we take on name and identity is not going to be easy, but it will be done with careful consideration of the views expressed by all those surveyed.
We'll be publishing further installments of our new brand story over the coming weeks, so please keep reading. Meantime, our thanks again to all those who participated so helpfully with the initial research.
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