| Charity Leaders’ Exchange |
If you’re your authentic self, you have no competition.
We are very happy to be able to share with you our personal branding report, ‘Growing and Maintaining a Personal Brand as a Charity Leader’, which is available on our network to our basic and full members.
Please login to the CLE and download our report here.
Personal branding is a subject that is becoming increasing important in our professional lives, but little discussed in the charity sector. The report includes insights from our recent evening Seminar- the expert speakers were Jan Carrington, Richard Moss and Dalton Leong and the audience made a great contribution too.
A topic that we tackled head on at the seminar is that some people feel that ‘personal branding’ is only for people who have big egos and that charity leaders should be focusing on burnishing the brand of the charity they serve, not their own. I hope that the report convinces you that ego isn’t part of the equation: personal branding is about deciding who you are and your values and communicating it to others in an authentic, human way. Many people work for particular charities precisely because their values chime with the aims of those charities. If their values didn’t chime, they would be likely either to loathe their jobs or to not be an effective advocate of the work of their organisation.
I also hope that the report convinces you that you don’t really choose to have a personal brand: everyone has one, even more so in our online age. Even if you choose to be offline as much as possible, that is making a statement about your values and priorities: that is your brand too. If you don’t take control of your personal brand, you run the risk of being misinterpreted, misunderstood and misrepresented. If you do take control, you can use your personal brand to amplify your effectiveness, support your career and weather professional storms when they loom into view. The report outlines and explains five tips to help you get your personal brand on track: be authentic, be consistent, be focused, be supportive and be patient. We hope that they can be applied on a practical basis to your roles as leaders in the charity sector.
To see some of the comments from the branding debate online and to offer your own views, please use the hashtag #personalbrand on Twitter. You can find our Twitter account here @CharityLeaders
Thanks to our sponsors Harris Hill Executive Search, Buzzacott and Stone King for their support of this piece of work.
-Alex
