What Are You Actually Building On?
A short explanation of Brand Values, and why they're worth defining before anything else gets designed.
This article is part of a series exploring the foundations of a strong brand: Brand Values, Brand Personality, Verbal Tone, and Visual Tone. We’ll look at these not as isolated branding exercises, but as practical tools that help organizations make thoughtful decisions, communicate consistently, and express themselves with confidence.
Long before an organization chooses a logo, debates a color palette, or redesigns its website, it has already begun building a brand.
That brand takes shape through thousands of decisions, many so ordinary they barely seem like branding at all. It's reflected in how the phone is answered, how a difficult client is treated, how donor dollars are stewarded, how staff members speak about one another, and how leaders respond when the easy decision isn't the right one. Those moments accumulate over time, creating an experience that people come to recognize and trust.
What guides those decisions?
For many organizations, the answer is instinct. Long-time employees know "how we do things around here." Founders can explain why one opportunity felt right while another didn't. Board members can usually tell when a decision aligns with the organization's character, even if they struggle to explain exactly why.
Those instincts are often rooted in a shared set of principles. We call those principles Brand Values.
Unlike a mission statement, which explains why an organization exists, Brand Values describe how that mission is lived out. They shape behavior. They influence priorities. They provide direction when there isn't an obvious answer. More than anything, they help an organization remain recognizable to itself as it grows.
That last point matters because organizations are organisms. They change. Staff members retire. New leaders arrive. Boards evolve. Programs expand. Communities change. Without a shared understanding of the principles that have guided those decisions, organizations can slowly drift, not because anyone intended them to, but because the knowledge that once lived in conversations and memories was never captured for the next generation.
Defining Brand Values is one way of preserving that wisdom.
Discovering Your Values
If your organization has never gone through this exercise before, resist the temptation to begin with a blank page.
Instead, begin with conversation.
Bring together people who know the organization from different perspectives. Include leadership, staff, board members, volunteers, or anyone else who has experienced the organization up close. Ask them about moments that made them proud. Ask about difficult decisions that still feel important years later. Ask which stories get told over and over again, and what they hope never changes, even as the organization grows.
The goal isn't to collect values. It's to collect evidence.
As those conversations unfold, patterns begin to emerge. The stories may be completely different, yet the ideas beneath them often point in the same direction. Those recurring themes become the raw material for discovering the values that have been quietly shaping the organization all along.
Finding the Right Words
Once those themes begin to emerge, it helps to introduce a common vocabulary.
A list of values isn't meant to tell your organization who it is. Instead, it gives people language to react to. Sometimes the right word appears immediately. Just as often, someone says, "That's close, but it isn't quite us," and the conversation becomes richer because everyone begins explaining what they really mean.
As a starting point, consider whether your discussions keep returning to ideas such as:
Caring for Others: Compassion, Empathy, Kindness, Hospitality, Service, Accessibility, Respect, Inclusion
Character: Integrity, Accountability, Transparency, Honesty, Courage, Stewardship, Humility
Excellence: Quality, Reliability, Craftsmanship, Professionalism, Discipline, Continuous Improvement
Curiosity and Growth: Creativity, Innovation, Learning, Adaptability, Entrepreneurship
Community: Collaboration, Partnership, Belonging, Generosity, Connection
Purpose and Impact: Leadership, Justice, Equity, Sustainability, Responsibility, Impact
Treat these as conversation starters rather than a checklist. Your organization's final values may not appear on this list at all. What matters is finding language that genuinely reflects how your organization thinks, behaves, and makes decisions.
Some organizations have become so closely associated with their values that they're recognizable long before anyone reads an annual report.
Patagonia's commitment to environmental stewardship is visible because it consistently influences decisions, from encouraging customers to repair clothing instead of replacing it, to investing in environmental causes, to rethinking how products are manufactured. The American Red Cross has spent more than a century reinforcing values of readiness, compassion, and service through its response to disasters and emergencies. The value becomes visible because it influences behavior.
A value isn't really a value until it changes a decision.
From Words to Working Definitions
Most organizations eventually settle on three to five core values. Fewer can leave important ideas unstated. More than five becomes difficult to remember and nearly impossible to apply consistently.
Choosing the words, however, is only the beginning. Every value deserves a definition that reflects what it means within your organization, and the differences can be sharper than you'd expect:
Transparency: Transparency is the foundation of trust, fostering open communication and accountability at every level. (29th Street Capital)
Transparency, defined differently: Buffer treats transparency as a default operating principle: sharing decisions, lessons, salaries, revenue, and company spending publicly unless there is a good reason not to.
Stewardship: caring for what's been entrusted to you, defined here to include donor dollars and food, but also their own staff's wellbeing. (Feeding America)
Stewardship, defined differently: faithfully maintaining a public campus on behalf of the community that owns it. (The Music Center, Los Angeles)
Same words, genuinely different definitions. Neither is more correct. Each reflects a different mission and a different responsibility. What matters is that everyone inside the organization shares the same understanding.
A one- or two-sentence definition transforms a value from an inspiring word into a practical guide. It gives leaders something to hire by, communicators something to write from, and staff members something to return to when difficult decisions arise.
Finally, write it down.
Future leaders deserve the opportunity to understand the principles that shaped the organization before they arrived. A documented set of Brand Values becomes part of the organization's institutional memory. It preserves hard-earned wisdom, creates continuity during times of change, and provides a foundation for every branding decision that follows.
Brand Values are only one part of that foundation. In the next article, we'll explore Brand Personality and how those shared principles begin to shape the character people experience every time they encounter your organization.
