Context

Bob Safian talks with Tjada McKenna, CEO of Prosper Global, the 40-year-old humanitarian organization formerly known as Mercy Corps, about why she rebranded during a funding crisis rather than waiting for calmer conditions. The conversation matters to PMs and leaders navigating any rebrand, repositioning, or mission clarification because McKenna's reasoning is unusually explicit: the old name was actively working against a strategy the organization had already been executing for years, and the crisis made the mismatch more costly to ignore, not less.

The Big Idea

A name or brand should describe what an organization is actually doing today and where it's headed, not what it used to do, and when the old name actively contradicts the current strategy, a crisis is a reason to fix that mismatch sooner, not a reason to wait.

McKenna's clearest evidence: potential donors repeatedly told her that Mercy Corps's own long-term, market-oriented work (seed insurance, blockchain-based identity management, a ten-year-old venture capital fund investing in businesses serving the communities they operate in) "has nothing to do with your name." The mismatch wasn't cosmetic, it was actively costing the organization credibility for work it had already been doing.

Key Insights

The old name was contradicting work already underway, not describing a future pivot

McKenna is explicit that Prosper Global's mission and values, helping people beset by poverty, conflict, or climate change live full, productive lives, have not changed at all; only the name has. The trigger was a specific, recurring conversation: when she described Mercy Corps's cash assistance, seed insurance, or blockchain identity work to potential donors, more than one told her plainly that this innovative, market-oriented work didn't match what the name "Mercy Corps" implied, connoting an organization that swoops in to save the day rather than one investing in long-term prosperity. The rebrand wasn't announcing a new strategy, it was correcting a name that had stopped accurately describing a strategy already in motion.

A phased, country-by-country rollout protected physical safety on the ground

Unlike a typical corporate rebrand, Prosper Global's transition wasn't simultaneous, because in more than 30 countries, many in active conflict zones, staff and communities had learned to recognize and trust the specific Mercy Corps branding and color as a signal of safety. McKenna's team explicitly does not travel with armed guards; their ability to operate depends entirely on community trust built over time, so the org let local staff and context (which government officials needed briefing, how contested authority was in a given region) determine each country's specific timing rather than imposing a single global rollout date.

Frontline staff understood the new identity faster than donors did

McKenna found that roughly 90% of her staff live and work in the communities they serve, and many of her program staff were among the first to embrace "Prosper Global," she says they saw themselves reflected in it directly: "we are not just charity cases... there are innovative things going on where we are." The resistance and confusion, by contrast, came disproportionately from donors and stakeholders in wealthier countries, who had a fixed mental model of what the organization did. This is a concrete data point for any repositioning decision: the people closest to the actual work may validate a new identity faster than the people furthest from it, who are anchored to the old story.

Second-order effects can be more damaging than the visible crisis

McKenna's "Hormuz to Hunger" report traces how a Strait of Hormuz oil disruption raises fuel costs in fragile countries, which raises fertilizer costs, which changes what farmers can afford to plant this season, which locks in food shortages for the following season, well before anyone experiences visible hunger. In Sudan specifically, she describes farmers facing a two-to-three-week planting window with fuel costs up 60%, where the decision to abandon land now becomes next year's famine, not this year's. The lesson for anyone assessing a crisis: the visible, immediate damage is often not the most consequential effect, the delayed, compounding second-order cost frequently matters more and is easier to miss entirely.

Deliberate attacks on infrastructure have become a repeatable playbook

McKenna traces a specific pattern she says started with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, deliberately attacking civilian and economic infrastructure (ports, bridges, grain silos, storage facilities) that international humanitarian law had traditionally treated as off-limits, and observes that pattern spreading to how conflicts are conducted elsewhere, including in Sudan and, she believes, Gaza. In Ukraine specifically, she notes farmers had a genuinely good harvest this year, but bombed-out silos and storage meant the grain couldn't be stored or moved to market, converting a successful harvest into a lost income period anyway. The strategic insight: once one actor demonstrates that attacking infrastructure works and goes unpunished, the tactic doesn't stay contained to that conflict.

Prevention is roughly seven times cheaper than emergency response

McKenna states that pushing donor funding toward prevention work (helping communities prepare for recurring crises like Nepal's floods, rather than only funding response after disaster strikes) is roughly seven times more cost-effective than life-saving emergency aid alone. This is her direct counter to donor pressure (including from the current US government) to fund only immediate, visible life-saving aid: that framing, while emotionally intuitive, is the less efficient way to spend the same dollar, and she treats "we can't choose between today's crises and preparing for tomorrow's" as a false choice the sector needs to stop accepting.

Trade-offs & Nuance

Rebranding during a funding crisis felt reckless, but wasn't discretionary

McKenna directly names the tension: the rebrand launched not despite the funding crisis and layoffs the organization was going through, but into the middle of it, and she describes a specific internal moment of doubt, whether it was appropriate to invest in a name change while laying off staff. Her resolution wasn't to treat the rebrand as a nice-to-have that could wait; she reframed it as the investment in the organization's future and its ability to change the funding narrative going forward, arguing that clinging to "the way things were" (the old identity, the old funding structures) was itself the more costly choice long-term, even though it looked like the more disciplined one in the moment.

Practical Application

Test whether your current name or brand still matches your actual work

Before assuming a name change is unnecessary friction, run McKenna's real test: describe your most innovative or forward-looking current work to a genuinely new audience (a prospective customer, partner, or donor) using your current name, and note whether they push back that the name doesn't fit what you just described. If that disconnect keeps recurring in real conversations, not just as an internal branding debate, that's a concrete signal the name is actively working against the strategy, not just a stylistic mismatch.

Sequence a sensitive rollout by where trust is most fragile, not by convenience

When rolling out any major change (a rebrand, a policy shift, a platform migration) across groups with very different trust relationships to the old identity, let the group with the most at stake (in Prosper Global's case, physical safety in conflict zones) set the pace and order, rather than defaulting to a single simultaneous launch. Brief the people closest to the risk first and let their read on local context determine timing, country by country if needed.

Check who actually understands your new positioning fastest

After any repositioning, deliberately compare reactions from the people doing the frontline work versus the people furthest from it (funders, external partners, leadership at a distance). If frontline staff or users grasp and embrace the new framing faster than your external stakeholders, treat that as validation the change reflects real, current work rather than aspirational messaging, and use their language to help bring skeptical outside stakeholders along.

Look one step past the visible crisis before allocating resources

When assessing any fast-moving crisis (a supply shock, a policy change, a market disruption), explicitly ask what second-order effect it sets in motion before the visible damage appears, the way a Strait of Hormuz fuel disruption becomes next season's food shortage through fertilizer costs and planting decisions. Resource decisions made only against the visible, immediate damage risk missing the more consequential, delayed cost.

Bottom Line

Prosper Global's rebrand shows that a name change earns its cost when it corrects a genuine, already-existing mismatch between what an organization says it is and what it's actually doing, and that a funding crisis is a reason to fix that mismatch faster, since the people closest to the real work (not the people furthest from it) are usually the ones who confirm whether the new story is true.