The Ultimate Guide to Nonprofit Branding Budgets

Let’s start with some basics. There are a few common-sense variables that have the greatest impact on determining the budget of a rebrand:

1. The size and complexity of the organization. A relatively young organization with a staff of fewer than 20 is very different from a well-established organization with a staff of hundreds. With the latter, there is more history to make sense of, more people to align, and more risk to mitigate. Facilitating, executing, and rolling out a rebrand successfully requires more effort for larger, legacy organizations than for smaller, newer ones. Operating budget tends to be the easiest proxy for determining an organization’s complexity.
   
   

2. The degree of change the rebrand is trying to communicate. A complete strategic repositioning and brand transformation is a much more involved process than a brand refresh intended to more accurately reflect the promise and personality the organization’s staff already know to be true. A rebrand to communicate a new mission, new approach, or a restructuring of program areas is more involved than a rebrand with the primary goal of establishing a flexible, well-documented design system. The extent of the real-world change at the organization greatly impacts the effort and the deliverables involved in a rebrand.
   
   

3. The reach and ubiquity of your brand. If the functional needs of a brand are to communicate with a focused audience in a few specific channels, you will need a less complex set of branding tools and assets than if your brand has a large public presence across multiple channels.

To estimate projects, we use Candid’s Guidestar to identify the operating budget of each new organization that reaches out to us. This helps get a quick read on their complexity. Then, we ask qualifying questions to identify how big of a shift the rebrand represents and how extensive the brand needs to be.

There are an infinite number of permutations of these three variables, but they are useful in establishing some general budget ranges for reference, which are much more realistic than oversimplifying nonprofit branding budgets in a monolithic way.

Operating budgets are the go-to measure for establishing capacity and budgets for organizations of different sizes.

If you lead a nonprofit communications team, you might already be used to thinking of your general marketing budget in this way. Larger organizations typically set aside 5%–15% of their total operating expenses for marketing. If your annual operating budget is $50M, that’s $2.5–$7.5M. Smaller organizations might set aside a higher percentage: about 10%–20% to be able to cover basic marketing needs. If your nonprofit has an operating budget of $100K and you only set aside 5% for marketing, you’ll find $5K won’t get you very far. The baseline costs of even DIY branding, websites, and collateral will likely cost you more than that. If your organization has a still relatively small operating budget of $1M, you’re probably spending $100-$200K on marketing. This percentage can vary widely depending on the size, mission, and stage of growth of the organization, but it’s a pretty good guidepost for reference.

Operating budget is also a good shorthand for staffing communications teams. According to the 2024 Nonprofit Communication Trends Report, smaller organizations with annual budgets under $1M devote on average 21% of their total staff to communications, which translates to about one staff member. Midsize organizations with annual budgets between $1M and $10M devote 10% of their total staff to communication, which translates to about two staff members. Larger organizations with annual budgets above $10M devote 4% or less of their total staff to communications, which translates to four staff members for a $20M nonprofit and 10 staff members for a $100M nonprofit.

We tend to think of branding efforts as capacity building — your brand provides the infrastructure for your communication and marketing efforts. So it’s illuminating to think of branding not as a marketing line item, but rather as a capital expenditure that should yield a significant return on investment. For some organizations, branding budgets might come directly out of their marketing budgets; for others it might come out of their reserve funds or from their board.

Regardless of the funding source, we’ll use operating budgets as a proxy to establish costs for rebranding projects.

Before we dive into the numbers, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• These numbers are informed by the budgets we’ve seen in the hundreds of incoming nonprofit branding RFPs we’ve reviewed over the years, as well as by conversations we’ve had with clients about projects we’ve competed for or won.

• For context, we’ve also included the number of organizations for each range registered with the Internal Revenue Service with 501(c) nonprofit status according to Guidestar in 2024. This should help in situating where your organization fits and how many other organizations are operating at a similar scale.

• The fee ranges for each operating budget level are agency fees only. It’s important to recognize that rebranding efforts require a lot of engagement from your organization’s staff. The cost of that time is not included in these fee ranges.

• These fees assume the scope of a rebranding effort can include brand strategy, verbal identity, visual identity, an updated organizational website, and preparing your team to roll the new brand out, but the depth and complexity of these deliverables increase substantially with each level of operating budget.

• The low to high ranges at each level reflect how big of a shift the rebrand represents and how extensive the brand needs to be. A brand refresh might not need to address the full range of deliverables above, while a brand engaging in a deeper repositioning and transformation might require more deliverables. A brand with limited channels might be on the low end of the range, while one with broader reach and more channels to consider might be on the high end of the range.

• Foundations and philanthropies, which can have very large endowments in the millions or billions of dollars, might have relatively low annual operating budgets. This puts them in a position to invest more heavily in branding than their operating budgets might suggest if there is a strategic imperative to do so.

Without further ado, here’s our Ultimate Guide to Nonprofit Branding Budgets:

After digesting these budgets you might be thinking “This makes total sense! This is so helpful.” Or you might be thinking “Dang, rebranding is expensive!” There’s truth in both.

What the table above hopefully makes clear is that your investment should be in scale with the size and scope of your organization, with the amount of change you need to communicate, and with the extent of the reach you’re aiming to have.