Interview with Marketer David Dunworth About Branding and Leadership
Discover How You and Your Teams Represent Your Brand
Learn how nonprofit leaders, boards and staff create negative brand recognition.
 
David Dunworth has been involved with nonprofit for many years and knows how branding and marketing are an integral piece of connection to stakeholders. He is a life-long learner and an expert in marketing. He’s an International best selling author. His site is http://marketingpartnersllc.com
 
 
Read the Transcript for the Interview
Hugh: Greetings, this is Hugh Ballou. My special guest tonight is David Dunworth. My co-host Russell Dennis is also here. Russell has been on this journey with me many times. I appreciate your being here, Russ. David, he will interject some questions along with me.
We pose the topic tonight of “Profit is not a dirty word.” Whoa. Before we get into that, I am going to ask you to tell people maybe three or four sentences about your background and why you should be talking about this topic so they can get some context on who David Dunworth is. I know you, and you have a lot of gifts to share. We are doing a snippet of those tonight. You and I have talked about how I encourage people to go away from the word “nonprofit” even though we understand that to describe the sector. It puts this in this scarcity thinking mode that we can’t make a profit. Speak a little bit. I am going more toward social benefit or social enterprise or tax-exempt charity. There are ways to describe us by not saying what we are not. What are we? David Dunworth, welcome to this interview. Say a little bit about your background, especially on this topic on branding and profit.
David: Sure. Thank you, Hugh. Thanks, Russell. Glad to be here. My name is David Dunworth. Like Hugh said, I have a few things I am aware of based on my history. After the Vietnam War was over, I went to the public sector in the private club business. From 1971 to 1997, I was in the private club business. I ran officers’ clubs and NCO clubs. When I got out, I stayed in the private club business. During that time, I worked with the board of directors for the Michigan Cancer Foundation, the Leukemia Society of America, the North Carolina Health Center, a few others. I am not a foreigner to what I like to call social enterprises, but the bulk of my experience is marketing. I work with some nonprofits. In fact, I work with one in Fort Collins, Colorado, and another one in Florida. We talk about profit.
We have to talk about profit in the charity business because that is where sustainability comes from. You can’t constantly be fundraising and burning it all up. You have to make enough revenue to build some reserves so that you have money that you can count on in those lean times. As you know, it gets leaner and leaner and tougher and tougher as more and more charities and social enterprises come to life. Everybody is fighting for similar dollars. Marketing and the word “profit” have to go hand in hand.
To give you an idea, up until five or ten years ago, most of the large national social enterprises were relying on their “brand”, their label, their logo to be their representative. A couple of the big ones, the American Heart Association and others, started building some directives and policies around their brand control and brand messaging. The key to the whole thing in my opinion is that most of today’s charities don’t really understand the word brand. Brand is a lot more than just the logo or the picture or whatever it is they believe they stand for. It looks like you want to interject something.

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