In one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, a boy named Eustace gets turned into a dragon. After many adventures (which make Eustace a better, um, person), the lion Aslan uses his mighty claws to dig the boy out of the dragon. Eustace describes it this way:

[W]hen he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.

Eustace didn’t choose to be a dragon, any more than people choose to be nags or whiners or addicts. Becoming a dragon is easy. It “just happens.”

Becoming a boy again – now that’s a different story. Unlike negative change, positive change takes effort.

It’s worth it in the end, but it hurts like billy-oh.

Like individuals, nonprofits fall easily and gradually into bad habits.

• Brand elements – logos, program names, even organization names – are put in place early on when there’s no money and the mission is still evolving. Years later, you’re stuck with an ugly, outdated, and dysfunctional brand identity.
• Websites whose user architecture made perfect sense a few years ago get new programs overlaid on top of existing navigation. Nothing about the resulting hodgepodge is intuitive or user friendly. Meanwhile, staff blogs and social media efforts exist in a parallel but separate universe.
• Contact lists are cobbled together from a bunch of sources and put into an Excel sheet that 25 years later still functions as the donor database, mailing list, and participant tracker.

In these subtle ways, a perfectly useable identity, website, or database becomes a dragon.

Users complain, staff spend half their time creating workarounds, donations and registrations fall off – but no one wants to go through the pain of changing the dragon back into a boy.

Redoing an identity, website, or database is hard, hard work. You have to:

• Have a lot of conversations with a lot of people: board, staff, patrons or constituents, volunteers – whoever has a stake in the broken thing you’re trying to fix.
• Solicit bids and find the right vendor(s) to do the work.
• Come up with a budget and a timeline.
• Find the money somewhere.
• Choose the appropriate staff project “owners” and free up their time to make the project a priority.
• Resign yourself and the selected project owners to long, boring slogs through mountains of detail.
• Have a clear rationale for why you’re doing what you’re doing, and expect to repeat it often.
• Arrange for staff training, after the project is complete, to ensure that the boy doesn’t turn back into a dragon.

It will take months, maybe even a year. It will cost money – often a lot of money – plus a considerable portion of staff time (which is also money, in case you hadn’t heard). It will be a headache and a half.

The only thing that will make you able to bear it is “the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.” Layers of gunk on a no-longer-serviceable logo, of miscellaneous crud on an outdated website, of aggregated errors in an untended database will disappear – not magically as in Eustace’s case, but by dint of serious effort.

The reward? The dragon becomes a boy.

• The organization name, logotype, design elements, and tagline all work together to present a fresh face to the world – one that reflects the way you’re changing lives now, rather than the way the founders thought you might when the nonprofit was barely a gleam in their eyes.
• The website clearly tells the world who you are and what you stand for. It makes donating and signing up easy as pie. It serves as home base for all your social media efforts, enabling you to create “buzz” for your work.
• The database holds accurate contact information. It can easily be sorted so that you can, for example, send different letters to donors and to potential members. Your printing and postage costs plunge while your e-mail delivery and open rates soar.

Yes, it’s work. But you’ll see after it’s done how much effort went into adapting your work to the dragon’s demands – effort that now can go into fulfilling your core mission.

It’s great to have help. Eustace didn’t go from dragon to boy on his own. I may not be a magical lion, but I do have resources to revamp your dragon-y old brand or website. Contact me. We’ll find the human element under that gnarly old skin.