Re-branding, Websites and GeoCom ‘14

I apologise for the sparse blogging over the past couple of weeks but I’ve been rather preoccupied with the three items above (and the other Geo: Big 5 events). The good news is that this work is paying off and we’ve made loads of progress to update people on.

First up is the branding, as many of you may have noticed (especially delegates at Future Cities) we have been working on a new brand. The old AGI brand has served well over the years but has become fragmented and a little dated over time. 

With the work being undertaken on a new AGI website we wanted to ensure that we had a clean and consistent new brand so this combined with the 25^th anniversary seemed like the perfect opportunity to undertake a rebranding exercise.

 More information can be found here but we feel the new brand gives a very clear visual statement that the AGI wants to make sure that it is doing all it can to be relevant in 2014 and beyond. The new brand is much more than just a logo and will reflect how we communicate within and beyond our industry going forwards and builds on a lot of work that is being done behind the scenes as to who we are and what we stand for.

We have created a page with the various brand resources on which can be found here.

Next up and probably most exciting for most of you is the work being done on a new website. Our current website is a little dated to say the least and places a lot of limits on what we can do so the decision has been taken that rather than attempt to re-skin and tinker with it we are going for a whole new site. 

I am lucky enough to be one of the small group working with the developers on the new site and I can already say it is going to be a vast improvement. We want the site and the member’s area to become a content and knowledge hub for the industry and will be populating it with news, features, interviews and content from passed events among other things.

As always the success of this will depend on our members and we will be making it accessible for SIGs and other groups to edit and add content that is interesting to them. We welcome comments from members on what content they might like to see and also if there is anything they would like to contribute. The new site is expected to go live in late June but in the meantime we have launched an interim site just for Geo: The Big 5.

Finally we come to GeoCom – ‘The Changing Face of Geo’, the change in name partly reflects a desire to move from an inward looking community to an outward looking group engaging with wider industry and partly because everyone just shortened it to GeoCom anyway. We visited the venue at the start of April and it is fantastic and a very different space to the EMCC. Not only is it a very nice looking country hotel but it also has an awful lot of different meeting rooms. This is going to enable us to run a lot more workshops and hands on training sessions (as the majority of delegates have requested). As a result we’re going to be delivering a GeoCom that is a lot more varied than last year with the core focus being on getting really good content and speakers.

Anyway more on GeoCom will follow as we finalise the programme and the speakers but in the meantime have a look at the new brand and think about what you might want to see on the new website.