As a long-time advocate of creating video (and animation) to promote (or even better: explain) CISV, I was glad to discover the video above. Even if beautifully designed and proffessional-ooking, I find a few things curious about this motion picture:
- To my knowledge "Children's International Summer Villages" should no longer be used and what the heck happened to the rest of the branding guidelines?
- Why so much focus on "starting with children", when the majority of our programmes deals with youth and adults?
It's actually only the new logo in the end that convinced me, that this wasn't produced in the ninetees... Also, the video underlines my theory, that CISV needs a more clear identity...
I have not worked directly with children in CISV for over around 5 years, but still actively contributed to the principles of the organisation.
I have the theory that we would be much more popular if we publitised what we really are now and not what was the idead over 50 years ago, what people thinks we should be, or what we guess the audience would like us to be....
seriously... who MADE this?
agreeing with all of the above
Marta; I think the problem is that we don't know who we are -- at least you won't be able to find two people that would agree on a unified CISV definition.
In many ways there was the past (who were we in 1951), present (who are we today), and the future (who do we want to be tomorrow); some wants us to stay in the past; others think the future is already here. Oh, and when we might agree on the past, the future... nobody agrees on.
The Programmes are our untouchables, we discuss them, we love them and we dislike them, but they are never discussed openly. My view is that we should break down the old programmes and put them back together in a more logical fashion -- maybe even with solid namings (to give clothes to the needy).
Maybe then we would agree on who we are, and maybe... one day... we would then agree on how to present ourselves. Now we try to go backwards. It. does. not. work.
Aninia: CISV USA according to the YouTube page.
Hey, the video was actually made by students in a Public Relations class at, I believe, the University of Cincinnati but at least on a university level. They were given information about CISV and had to compete to make the best video to use for promotion. So the interesting part is that it was made by non-CISVers based on information given to them by someone in CISV USA-many of whom still ferociously believe the village based identity of CISV-but note no mention of Doris Allen! It was "revealed" at the NBM in 2008 or 2009 JUST BEFORE the session showing everyone the passport (continuing branding questions there) which more or less replaced the video's premise (for now).
Just some background!
Sarah
Just to add on to what Sarah (correctly) stated:
This promotional material was created specifically for a class at a local university in Cincinnati in 2008. The students in the class had to create a visual identity for the organization based off of information given to them. The results (like this video) were extremely well put together and presented at our National Board Meeting that year. In addition to the video seen here, there were posters, notecards, pamphlets and business cards--not all limited to children.
The PR committee that year gave the EC (of which I was leaving) copies of posters. I still have them. Here are several of the taglines:
"Who Is Peace? We are part of peace. Together we create harmony and understanding. Find out how you can take part in programs that share the goal of peace by visiting cisvusa.org."
"What do you have in common with them (photo of kids in national costumes)? They are students just like you...they have likes and dislikes, they have dreams and goals. come join them in building an international community of peace."
There were several others as well, but I'll save space and note that it was a very cool project with some awesome results. If you'd like me to scan/take a photo of the posters, I'd be happy to.
I was just looking at these "Badges" people have on Facebook pictures now, which have the CISV Logo with no tagline and thinking how much the rebranding process of 2005-2007 failed in creating a single identity for CISV.
Hopefully we will now get somewhat on track with the new education tools and "Communications Review", but for now it doesn't seem to be working fine.
But the way CISV and its members perceive the organization has to be clarified better....
Ze: It took probably 20 years for the pre-1985 logo (the one with the continents filled in with dots) to go away. Every year people also submit forms that went out of date years ago... so one part is lack of comms, the other part is that managing CISVers is like hurding cats -- no matter what you say people do what they want in the end.
Thanks, Sarah and Martin for the background info - it's great to see such a co-operation, and it's always worthwhile to use professionals for our purpose. Nevertheless, CISVs identity and branding are quite a sensitive subject. And the way CISV is presented in this video is not the kind of CISV I like. So, in the end we - the "global movement" as we like to see our selves - should start acting as one, and communicate our vision and methods in a common way.
I was actually relived to see the correct logo in the ending sequence. But, you're right, Sarah - under those premises, oh boy, where the heck is Doris Allen in this video...hehehe...
Nick: Communicating our vision and methods in a common way would require a common vision... As frequent readers might have found ou by now, this is becoming a pet peeve on my side...
I agree with Lars, that this is much more about the fact that we have too many identities. We don't have a common vision and I think that we are lying to ourselves if we think that we have. I (like many people) are happy to see some new promotional materials and educational materials which encompass our values, however I think that sometimes we do leave behind parts of the organisation.
I think that something to remember is that our biggest programme by far is still village, there are more interchanges then any other programme and summer camps are almost as large as the village programme now. To my knowledge, these programmes speak mostly to children. I think that in the eyes of many people active in CISV International (and I speak for myself here as well to some extent), these programmes are less sexy, they are what we used to be, and we have 'moved on'. But clearly we haven't because they are still our biggest programmes and still at the heart of what CISV means to so many people in our organisation. Nick - it would be cool to have a graph displaying how many participants per age range we reach per year.
Lars, I like your idea of breaking down an rebuilding some of the more traditional elements of programmes of this organisation, then maybe we could try to work towards a more streamlined image and message.
I do think it's a great video, and can be useful for promotion of village. So for this target audience, I think it's a great resource (of course after correcting the few things like the acronym and so on).
I am also a huge advocate of making a promotional video for CISV, however, before the communications review is complete, accepted and approved I think it would be wasted effort.