Taglines, those pithy one-liners that follow the name of an organization, can let people know within two seconds what your organization does and how it helps them.
Yet too many companies don’t have a tagline because they can’t think of something clever.
If that’s you, Nancy Schwartz’s 2010 Tagline Contest for Nonprofits will inspire you. Nancy is a nonprofit marketing expert, and she’s sponsoring the third annual Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Award (a.k.a. The Taggies).
“A strong tagline does double-duty—working to extend your organization’s name and mission, while delivering a focused, memorable and repeatable message to your base. It’s one of your most basic, and effective, marketing tools, but a GettingAttention.org survey showed that 72% of nonprofit organizations don’t have a tagline or rate theirs as performing poorly.”
You can see a complete list of 2008 and 2009 tagline winners here.
These are some of my favorites:
Montana Historical Society:
Big Sky. Big Land. Big History.
Texas Nonprofits:
Building community deep in the hearts of Texans
The United Negro College Fund:
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste ®
PA Breast Cancer Coalition:
Finding a curenow…so our daughters won’t have to
Nothing But Nets:
Send a net. Save a life.
Homeboy Industries:
Nothing Stops A Bullet Like A Job
NYC Theatre Spaces:
Where Actors Find Their Space
If you want to enter this year’s competition, turn it into a fun contest for your organization. Ask your employees, volunteers and others to submit ideas for the your tagline, and then award a prize for the best one. Once you’ve chosen it, enter it in the 2010 Taggies contest.
Do you have a clever tagline? If so, share it here.
Beth Parker Art
“Art that makes your butt wiggle”
Our company represents lifestyle artist (and the top licensed surf artist in history), Drew Brophy. Drew’s taglne is “inspire your imagination.”
A tagline can be so difficult to come up with, but we found that if we just decided, in a couple words, what we were trying to do overall, that would be it. And it was!
Fun topic, Joan. Our company is often called upon to craft brand names, taglines and logos and we welcome the opportunity as they are such a vital part of a brand identity and overall brand strategy.
Most recently, we created a strategic positioning statement that is the tagline for internships.com: Hired Education™. Hired Education™ cleverly illustrates the value of the Internships.com program by suggesting the on-the-job education that students will receive when hired as an intern.
For The ‘field Zone, a safe and friendly activity center built to inspire the youth of Southfield, Michigan, we coined the warm & fuzzy tagline: “Your Zone Away From Home.”
These are just a couple of the many taglines we’ve coined over the years. We love helping businesses define their value proposition with an emotional and memorable hook that seals their positioning in the minds of consumers.