Sweden vol. 7: Everyone Needs a Little Re-Branding Sometimes

Remember the first time you heard about re-branding? What did you think about it? Choose one of the following:

//Yeah! This is something that the organization needs!
//Dude, this stuff sounds a little too corporate to me. "Damn the man, Save the empire!"
//Does this mean I won't be able to paint my own CISV t-shirts anymore? I'm tentative.
//Re-branding? I think that's the town we visited on my village excursion day

If you haven't heard about the CISV's rebranding process until now, then let us fill you in! In 2004, CISV decided that it would undergo a process to evaluate and redesign the way we project our organization to people and groups outside of CISV. A process was undergone to gather information about what people (both inside and outside CISV) believe CISV stands for and represents.

After a huge deal of research, there was a big fat vote. Several questions were voted on (one vote per member country of CISV International) and decisions were come to:

1. In its marketing communications, CISV should use “CISV” as its primary name, rather than
“Children’s International Summer Villages”. Yes
2. Should CISV change its current logo? No
3. To makethe current logo more digitally friendly without fundamental changes to its current elements? Yes
4. Should CISV adopt a “tag line” to use in conjunction with whichever logo is chosen? Yes
“Building Global Friendship”, has been selected as CISV’s tag line.

So, CISV chose not to adopt a new logo but rather to update and simplify the original. Here is what was unveiled the other day in the plenary of the Annual International Meeting: Okay, so it looks a little rounder, a little cleaner...So what? Now what? The next step of the re-branding process is to unify the image of CISV internationally. This means guidelines for how "the CISV brand" can be used. The idea is to make CISV's image a unified one

A question: Will this re-branding help CISV grow and gain credibility OR will re-branding stiffle creativity and divide CISV members who have different opinions? What do you think?

For more information about the rebranding process and to see more of the new visual materials, check out www.ktp.cisv.org Don't forget to let us know what you think about this!

Peace. k&a