What’s in a Name? Selecting, Keeping and Changing Nonprofit Organizations’ Names
By Susan M. Chambré, Baruch College, City University of New York (smchambre@aol.com)

A nonprofit organization’s name is its most obvious characteristic. The name an organization chooses and the decision to change its name tells us a great deal about how an organization presents itself to donors, board members and clients. Names are an important part of an organization’s identity, a symbol of the organization. Nonprofits’ names have an economic value attracting donors and conferring legitimacy to people and to other organizations associated with it. Some well-known organizations trademark their names. Recently, some nonprofits have allowed their names and their logos to be associated with particular products, like Cheerios and the American Heart Association, a fact that has led the Attorneys General of a number of states to consider the commercial value of nonprofits’ names.

Despite their significance, we know little about nonprofits’ naming practices. This paper maps the empirical and theoretical issues regarding how nonprofits select, keep and change their names and the functions their names serve in their growth and survival. It includes a review of past studies on corporate and nonprofit naming practices and qualitative data on naming practices of all new HIV/AIDS organizations founded in New York City between 1981 and 2001.

The name of a nonprofit organization is important in a number of ways. First, it encapsulates many aspects of an organization’s identity and the image it projects to stakeholders and to consumers. Names clarify the nature of an organization’s service or product. A distinctive or unique name, like God’s Love We Deliver, an AIDS organization in New York City, made it distinctive and attracted funders and the mass media.

Names have taken on an added significance in the age of the internet because organizations’ domain names must be distinct. The animal rights groups, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whose acronym is PETA, successfully won back the domain name PETA.ORG from another group with the same acronym, People Eating Tasty Animals. Similar names, chosen intentionally or by accident, have led to confusion, lawsuits as well as undeserved opprobrium. Some organizations have been charged with intentionally selecting the names of other organizations to benefit from their legitimacy. Conversely, having a similar name as another group may be problematic. This led the Christian College Coalition to change its name to distinguish itself from the Christian Coalition.

For nonprofits, names might be purposely opaque or vague so as not to stigmatize the organization or to allow it to change its mission without changing its name. One important illustration of this is the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which changed its name to the March of Dimes to reflect its broad financial support and then changed its mission to funding research on birth defects once a cure for polio was found.

A second conclusion is that names are selected from within a range of acceptable names that are influenced by cultural constraints and isomorphic forces. Thus, there are fads and fashions in nonprofit names just as there are in the corporate world. Organizations change their names when fashions change. Name changes also occur when an organization wants to signify a change in its mission or its membership. When the demand for Italian speaking actors declined in the U.S., the Italian Actor’s Union became the Guild of Italian American Actors, signifying the inclusion of English speaking actors of Italian descent. The Women’s Talent Corps, founded in 1970 to educate mature students, changed its name to the College for Human Services, to Audrey Cohen College to honor its founder and more recently to Metropolitan College to communicate its diverse student body and its expanded mission, including business education, not just training for work in human services.

Name changes also become necessary when two or more organizations merge since combining the names of several organizations creates long and awkward monikers. A change of name, then, serves an adaptive function symbolizing a changed mission. It also permits an organization to distinguish itself from similar groups or groups that might have tarnished its image. Some groups choose to retain their names. This has been the case for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first AIDS organization in the world, whose name originally reflected its founders and original clients. The name is no longer descriptive but the organization has consciously retained its name to honor its past.

Names serve a range of functions. To various stakeholders--donors, clients and the public at large--they link an organization to its past, to its present, and to its future.

The above information was presented as a paper at the 2002 ARNOVA Conference.

Susan M. Chambré is a Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her publications examine the social and cultural determinants of volunteerism, the nature of faith-based philanthropy and the role of health advocacy groups in shaping social policies. She is currently writing Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease. A past Vice President for Publications, Susan has been a member of ARNOVA since 1980. She can be reached at smchambre@aol.com