When Andrew Steele joined Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service as its top fundraiser, he found the name so unwieldy he had to sneak in an extra breath while introducing himself to potential donors.
The charity’s new name — Global Refuge — “makes it much easier for us to get to the important part of the pitch,” says Steele, the group’s chief development and mobilization officer.
The nonprofit world is known for long and clunky names, and Steele’s employer first tried the common remedy of shortening its moniker to an acronym, but that proved problematic, too. LIRS can be pronounced “leers” or “liars” — neither of which is likely to bolster the image of a charity that has served and advocated for refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants since 1939.
There were other reasons for the charity’s rebranding as Global Refuge, which it announced in January. The charity is heavily dependent on government funding — which accounts for 95 percent of its $280 million budget — but that support is whipsawed by politics and the number of immigrants admitted to this country.
The charity hopes to win more support from private foundations and corporations, but its “faith forward” former name — which references its Lutheran origins — didn’t necessarily appeal to private foundations, which are often wary of religious groups. And the charged word “immigration” in the name frightened off many potential supporters who shy away from controversy, especially corporate foundations.
“We have to build more long-term sustainable support from individuals and foundations,” Steele says. “Our reliance on government funds has been a roller coaster depending on who’s controlled Congress or the White House.”
Steele says the 85-year-old charity didn’t invest in fundraising until after the 2008 financial crisis. Even in 2019, when he joined the organization, the charity had just one major gift officer and a $1,000 donation was deemed a major gift. Global Refuge continues to receive support from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and other Lutheran denominations, but the combined contribution from churches adds up to just over $400,000 a year, a tiny fraction of its budget.
‘Mission Above All Else’
The charity turned to Legend Labs, a branding firm in Austin, Tex., for help with a new name. The company surveyed the group’s supporters and partners and found that people weren’t typically giving to the group because of its Lutheran affiliation — they were giving because they cared about helping refugees and asylum seekers.
“The survey found that people care most about the mission above all else — people are drawn to our cause by the work,” says Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the charity’s CEO. “The brand name is the first introduction to our work. We knew it needed to draw people in and clearly signal what we do and who we serve.”
Global Refuge hit a low point in 2020, the final year of the Trump administration. The number of refugees admitted to the United States fell 60 percent that year, to just 12,000, forcing the charity to close 17 offices.
But the Afghanistan refugee crisis in 2021 led to a boom in resettlement work. The charity assisted 14,000 of the roughly 80,000 Afghan refugees who came to the United States. The charity drew in 20,000 new donors in response to that crisis, and the attention focused on Ukrainian refugees in 2022 led to another peak in giving.
A $15 million gift from MacKenzie Scott in 2022 helped pay for several new efforts at the charity, including its first international office, in Guatemala, where employees help children deported from the United States return to their families. The Scott funds also support nine welcome centers in U.S. cities that help new immigrants with mental-health screenings, legal services, and school enrollment, among other services.
The excitement around those efforts has boosted giving by others. Global Refuge hopes to raise $8 million to $10 million from private support this year, up from about $3 million in 2020.
Pros and Cons
The new name is receiving mixed reviews from longtime supporters, especially some in the Lutheran church who view the name Global Refuge as an attempt to obscure the organization’s faith-based roots.
“We know that this was emotional for some of our supporters — we know that it was hard for some to accept,” Vignarajah says. “We’ve seen strong positive and negative responses.”
Branding and philanthropy experts also have varied opinions on the new name.
Deroy Peraza, a partner and creative director at Hyperakt, a branding firm that works with nonprofits, says the average length of a name in the nonprofit sector is 27 characters, compared with seven characters for for-profit corporations. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service came in at 36 characters.
Peraza says the word “refuge” brings some poetry to the group’s new name, an improvement on the “really bureaucratic and boring” original.
“How can you remember a four-word name with long words? It’s just always going to hurt you,” he says. “The first impression is all about people being able to remember the name. If you can’t get past that step, you’re working against so many barriers.”
The move away from a name that captured both the charity’s heritage and its mission will have pluses and minuses, says Brad Fulton, an associate professor of nonprofit management at Indiana University.
He views Global Refuge as a solid but vague name that doesn’t shed any light on “who they are or what they do.”
That might help the charity raise money from private foundations, which tend to be secular, he says. “If I’m a secular program officer, there’s a natural aversion to a faith-based groups,” Fulton says. “Everything you see in the media, warranted or not, suggests that faith-based action tends to be conservative and intertwined with politics. Program officers want to make a safe bet — they don’t like taking risks. Their board may say, Why would you touch that potential lightning rod?”
On the other hand, he says, Global Refuge could potentially be accused by the people it serves of running a bait-and-switch — hiding its ongoing faith-inspired approach behind its new secular-sounding name.
Steele says he thinks the opposite result is more likely — refugees will warm to Global Refuge more quickly without any religious reference in its name. The charity has a former board member, he says, who was herself a refugee fleeing a country where religion was the source of conflict. She was assisted by Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and she did worry briefly about whether she would have to convert to Lutheranism to receive the charity’s help.
“That refugees felt that potentially should give us pause,” Steele says. “They’re the reason we exist.”
