A nonprofit by any other name

Rebranding is all the rage. In the corporate world, Google is now Alphabet. Facebook is Meta. In the NYS nonprofit sphere, grantors are going regional and grant recipients are going snappier.

Foundations that have their roots in urban centers are adding their location (Finger Lakes, North Country, etc.) to their names. Nonprofit arts and tourism sites have assumed shorter monikers more suitable to marketing campaigns. The awkwardly named Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica is now, simply, the Munson.

Sometimes new labels ramp up the promise of excitement and a good time. The former Adirondack Museum is now the Adirondack Experience. In Tupper Lake, the Adirondack Museum of the Natural World is now known as The Wild Center.

And then, of course, there is the long-standing tradition of renaming nonprofits to honor generous donors. The Albright–Knox Art Gallery is now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, in recognition of the multi-million-dollar donations of investor Jeffrey Gundlach. Also in Buffalo, the Women and Children’s Hospital has become the John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital, for gifts from the foundation launched by the industrialist who died in 1968.

So does rebranding work? Does it boost image, attract more patrons, reflect changing times?

Some marketing experts would argue that these are the wrong questions to ask.

“Rebranding is actually a record of a transformation that has happened or is already under way,” writes Deroy Peraza, partner and marketing director of Hyperakt, a Brooklyn firm that specializes in nonprofit branding. “In our experience, most rebranding projects are rooted in one thing: your current brand simply isn’t a reflection of who you are as an organization any more.”