About Our Name

Fieldstone Alliance? Where'd you get that ?

If you've known us as Wilder Publishing Center and Wilder National Consulting Services, you're probably wondering how we came up with Fieldstone Alliance. A few of our longtime friends have asked. Some of you have said “I like it,” while others have wrinkled your noses.

Here's the story.

If you've been through a branding process, or named a program, or titled a book, or even named a baby, you know how very difficult the whole thing can be.

Even with the help of our branding consultant, it was not easy.

Before we looked at names, we started with a survey of our constituents. We needed to know how the people who are important to us actually see us.

That survey was extremely helpful. It told us that our book customers, our consulting clients, our funders, and our peers shared some very similar views of us.

Our constituents gave us a collection of wonderful attributes to build an identity on. Given more than 500 words to choose from, the most frequently chosen were effective, committed, passionate, quality, knowledgeable, accountable, credible, industry leader, and admired.

Good news, bad news

Well, that was good news, and it was heartening to receive the kind words and learn that they were consistent across our businesses of consulting, publishing, training, and research/demonstration projects.

But we also learned a bit of bad news. Individuals were unclear on who we were as a whole. Many knew us only as publishers. Many knew us only as a group of consultants, or even thought of us in terms of a single consultant. Few were aware of our work in training and in promoting research/demonstration projects that build knowledge in the field of nonprofit effectiveness.

That's understandable. Like the story of the blind men touching the elephant, each of our customers experience only one part of the whole, without an awareness of our other activities and offerings. A trunk, ears, tusks, a tail—we are each of those to one customer or another, but an elephant to very few.

That's a clear challenge for us, and makes the choice of a name more precious. True, we've been working closely together as Wilder Publishing and Wilder Consulting, departments within the Wilder Foundation, in various forms for 22 years. And internally we've been clear for some time about our shared goal: to strengthen the nonprofit sector.

That mission makes sense to us and to some of the people we work with, who spend much of their efforts trying to help the nonprofit sector.

Understandably, many—even most—of our constituents are not overly concerned with the health of the nonprofit sector as a whole. A small, community-based nonprofit may know us only through a few pages photocopied from a tattered copy of Strategic Planning Workbook for Nonprofit Organizations. A county-wide network of service providers may know us primarily as collaboration consultants. A large intermediary—serving hundreds of nonprofits and 15,000 end-users—sees us as a strategic consulting partner that helps line up systems and resources. A funder who brings us in to help its grantees cope with state cutbacks knows us as providers of training sessions accompanied by hands-on workbooks. A worried board treasurer, looking for solutions, knows of us only from a visit to our website to download a set of free financial terms.

For most of these customers, "improving the nonprofit sector" does not send chills down the spine. This made finding a name that communicates something about us a bit difficult.

What's in a name? A lot more than you think!

With our branding consultants, we went through thousands of names. No joke. Many involved the word "sector." CrossSector, SectorWorks, Sector Builders. Many were strange, like Vallo Group or Inventurist. Some were clever, like CauseWay. Some had all the charm of a mouthful of thistles, like the Center for Building Capacity in the Nonprofit Sector. Some were vaguely appealing but unconnected to anything about us, like the Newel Group.

Time dragged on. We rejected names, our test group of constituents rejected them, favored names were found to be in use by others whose business was too similar to ours or whose business was creepy and we didn't want to be anywhere near them on the internet. Even our tolerant and friendly branding consultants began to wear down, and with all the other work we were doing to prepare for the spin-off from Wilder Foundation, we began to look like hollow-eyed zombies. (So much so that one of us finally suggested naming the organization The Army of the Undead. Based on that, Steve Michaels-Boyce, the designer for our Fieldstone Alliance logo, produced this friendly icon to cheer us along.)

So, we began to search for names that had less direct connection to the mission and more connection to other things that were important to us as a group. Names of flowers, locales, minerals, mythic characters, and natural resources crept in. Late one night, sleepless acting director Carol Lukas (now official president/CEO of Fieldstone Alliance), glanced at the collection of stones she'd brought back from her travels, including Lake Superior agates, Rocky Mountain quartzes, Turkish limestone, smooth river rocks, and hefty fieldstones. Fieldstone clicked for her, she brought it in, the branding consultants agreed to check with our customers, and we all began trying it on for size. After all, she is the boss.

Here's why we picked Fieldstone…

No name is perfect. But as we worked with Fieldstone, it began to feel better and better.

First, it captures an important part of our work: another way of describing our mission is saying that we work to build the field of nonprofits.

Second, fieldstones are interesting. They occur around the world. In the northern hemisphere, many were carried hundreds of miles by glaciers. They are solid and they are useful. They are multicolored, ranging from deep slate, to rich red, to pale wheat; they can be as vibrant as a Caribbean sunset or as gray as a Minnesota winter. Farmers gather them as they clear and prepare the fields for work—and then turn them into forms both functional and beautiful: foundations, fences, walls, cairns, hearths.

Sure, fieldstone is not a perfect metaphor. Fieldstones are not a full match with the attributes our customers arrived at. The relation between fieldstones and “building the nonprofit sector” by building the “field” is a wee bit of a stretch.

But fieldstones are solid and grounded—a colorful natural resource. And we like them.

Now, about that Alliance word

“Alliance” was much easier for us to arrive at. We turned away consultancy terms like group or place terms like center. First, internally, our work is an alliance of several streams of business, all working together seamlessly (well, attempting to work together seamlessly) to help the nonprofit sector function more effectively.

Second, and more important, a majority of our work—consulting, research/demonstration projects, training, even book sales—is done in alliance with others. For example, we've got a wonderful publishing alliance with our San Francisco friends, CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, and our D.C.-based friends, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. And most of our large-scale consulting and research/demonstration programs are built on alliances, such as our NEXUS program on refugees, our work with the National Association of Workforce Boards, and others—it's rare that we consult with a single organization, as more of expertise is aimed at the work of intermediaries and others.

So for those reasons, Fieldstone Alliance makes sense. We hope you like it.

Besides, it sure beats Army of the Undead.