“A-N-N looks dreadful, but A-N-N-E looks so much more distinguished”
Five questions organizations should ask themselves when naming or renaming stuff
If you are or were ever into historical coming-of-age novels, you might have recognized this newsletter’s titular quote from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Anne, the title character, is all about naming. She names trees, houseplants, and places. She asks people to call her Cordelia, a name she thinks elegant, but qualifies that “if you must call me Anne, please spell it Anne with an ‘E’... A-N-N looks dreadful, but A-N-N-E looks so much more distinguished."
What’s in a name? Anne knows better than anybody else that the answer is a whole darn lot.
The power to name is one of the most impactful tools we have as humans. A name can determine whether someone or something is memorable or not; allude to historical watersheds or cultural trends; cue, mystify, or mislead us as to what they’re about; and evoke positive emotions or negative ones. When my son was born prematurely, I agonized over his Chinese name. We’d previously planned to name him 小虎, Little Tiger, in honor of what had been supposed to be his lunar birth year. Also, tigers are awesome! For me, they evoke fierceness and grace. But my son ended up coming into the world at the tail-end of the Year of the Ox. And I’ll just say this: “bovine” has never been used as a complimentary adjective to describe any human. Also, as my husband kept intoning, the Bengals were playing in the Super Bowl for the first time since 1989! So we stuck with Little Tiger.
Essentially, names are the kingpins of stories. So here’s what baffles me. Even as the social sector has increasingly leaned into storytelling as a tool for change, they have not leaned into their power to name. Take the recent scramble among prominent nonprofit organizations to rebrand. Always, the rebrand includes a new website, a new logo, new colors—a new look. Sometimes, the rebrand includes a narrative shift, e.g. this one. But organizations are reluctant to even consider whether their names are working for them.
I get it. Renaming comes with all sorts of risks—most significantly, losing existing name recognition. They shouldn’t be tackled willy-nilly. Unsurprisingly, when organizations do change their names, the change is often just a super recognizable abbreviation of the original name. National Public Radio became NPR, the YMCA became just the Y, and Dunkin’ dropped the “Donuts.” But social sector organizations have to realize two things about naming:
Naming runs throughout an organization’s story—in programs, job titles, initiatives, campaigns. Most organizations probably shouldn’t change their overall name, but what other names might they change in order to fit their new story?
Sometimes, an organizational name just doesn’t work anymore (if it ever did). Better to cut the trivial (or negative) name recognition losses and start from scratch.
So, how should your organization go about naming or renaming stuff? Here are some prompts to help you get started.
five questions to consider…
Is the name a mouthful?
Honestly, if your organization, program, or initiative is named The Collective Movement for the Prevention of Cruelty to Bovines and their Close Relatives, it’s time for an abbreviation if not a complete overhaul. Nobody, probably not even your staff, is going to remember how to say this verbatim. Plus, a name like this will clutter any social media post, text, or title slide. Dunkin, NPR, and the Y all had pretty succinct names to begin with, but they abbreviated them more—partly, I’d guess, to make catchier hashtags, and also shorter seems hipper. (Check out this article explaining the Y’s decision to abbreviate). WGBH, the public media station where I previously worked, even dropped their first letter to become just GBH.
Is the name distinctive?
I was born in the eighties, during a time when the name Jessica was the most popular name for a baby girl by a landslide. In elementary school, we always had to call the Jessicas by their last initials—Jessica A. Jessica R. Jessica P.—in order to keep them straight. While you’d expect a teacher and classmates to make the effort to distinguish between children, you can’t expect your stakeholders to make the same effort of keeping track of which program is yours. A few years ago, new K-12 civics programs were popping up everywhere like mushrooms after rain. So when GBH developed its own civics education program, we had to ensure our name didn’t get lost among all the other programs out there, e.g. iCivic, Civiced, Generation Citizen, Citizen Schools (which, incidentally, isn’t civics curriculum), Local Civics, and CivXNow, etc. With help from youth focus groups, we landed on Youth Stand Up.
Who are you getting associated with?
Social sector organizations often pick names that capitalize off the name recognition of other, established organizations. For example, after Teach for America came Act for America, Bat for America, Code for America, Lead for America, Venture for America, Work for America, etc. After Doctors without Borders came Engineers without Borders, Reporters without Borders, Lawyers without Borders, Art without Borders, etc. Theoretically, it’s not a bad idea. But word associations extend beyond just recognition! It’s important that you consider what assumptions you might be evoking about your organization by association… and are those assumptions correct?
What does the name imply—and does that serve your story?
All names carry connotations, so it’s important that you choose names that evoke the right connotations for your organizational story. For example, a couple years ago, a lot of organizations began spinning narratives about positive work culture, employee care, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. As part of that new narrative, they renamed their Head of Human Resources positions to be Chief People Officer, which sounds more employee-friendly and evokes a sense of culture rather than of compliance. The edtech startup Bilingual Generation recently changed its name from The Language Preservation Project, “to maintain an identity more closely tied to our work while respecting and honoring those communities more deeply involved in indigenous language preservation work.” Check out how their founder, Veronica Benavides, explains the rebrand; she’s an exceptional storyteller.
What does the name imply, given the social context?
This question deserves to be repeated. Beyond considering how the names you use advance your organizational storytelling goals, it’s also important to consider how they land given the (perpetually changing) social context. Recently, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer asked for readers’ opinions of what shorthand name they should use to reference a proposed amendment to the Ohio constitution that will appear on this November’s ballot. The official title of the amendment is The Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety, which the editor explains “is way, way too long to use in headlines and lead paragraphs of stories.” What would it mean to call it the Right to Life Bill, versus the Abortion Amendment, versus the Women’s Choice Protection Amendment? Here’s the newsletter the editor wrote about it.
long story short…
Names matter a whole lot, and if social sector organizations are serious about leveraging storytelling as a tool to advance the change they seek, they need to take a look at their names.
The indomitable Anne Shirley sums it up best: “I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”
