Naming a multi-nonprofit website, and giving it a tagline.
As is the case with many clients, the Forum for Youth Investment came to Namebrand having exhausted its in-house naming processes. The problem they faced was to come up with a name and URL for a website that would act as a conduit for information, action and contributions to nonprofits working on behalf of America’s young people. It therefore had to be appropriate for a diverse group of organizations whose focus was on young people aged from 0 to 20. This precluded the use of many of the most obvious terms relating to the website’s target (kids, children, youth, young people), since none was sufficiently inclusive. Yet the name still had to be easily understandable, and cover the broad range of purposes (information, advocacy, fundraising, etc.) which the website would serve. Added to this was the need to reach consensus among the dozen or so members of the steering committee representing the sponsor group. The final challenge was the inevitable difficulty of finding an available URL using real English words in an already crowded area. The felicitous result, embraced by all the players involved, was SparkAction.org. Not only does this name embrace all the activities the website covers, it also serves as a call to action and an inspiration to those who are or might want to become involved.
A second phase of the project involved developing a tagline/slogan to accompany the name, and make its purpose explicit. Namebrand’s stirring solution was “For children. For youth. For change”. Again, this was enthusiastically adopted by all the parties involved, and makes a prominent and effective contribution to the website’s identity.
