Larry M. Rosen

President & CEO

“My God, people, you’re the only organization on the planet that owns a letter of the alphabet.”

                  --  Penelope Burke, President, Cygnus Applied Research

                       Author, Donor Centered Fundraising

                     — in remarks to a YMCA conference several years ago on the unrealized power of the YMCA’s brand.

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Well, Penelope, we may not be the fastest horse in the race, but we do finish well. We finally got it: why not, indeed, refer to the YMCA publicly the way virtually everyone in the world has been doing for the 5 generations since World War I — the Y.

Following two years of research, consultation, renting-of-clothes, debate and careful thought, the YMCA’s updated logo, graphics and brand promise were revealed to an enthusiastic audience of 3,000 YMCA leaders by President Neil Nicoll at last week’s National General Assembly in Salt Lake City. Take a look:

The five color palettes are intentional — a safety valve for the impulse to local creativity, something few YMCAs can resist. YMCAs can pick the palette that suits the communications vehicle best, but they may not goof around with any other feature of the design. In virtually every application, the logo will be accompanied by the YMCA’s three major areas of purpose and emphasis:

For more - much more - on this logo And what it means, go to the YMCA of the USA’s website: ymca.net — it’s pretty exciting stuff.

Depending on how you count, this is either the 7th or the 10th logo change in the YMCA’s 160-year history in North America. 10th, if you give credit for minor edits (such as the addition of the phrase We build strong kids, strong families, strong communities to the black/red cocktail glass block Y in around 1993); 7th, if you only count big graphics changes, like going from the red and blue triangle of the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s to the cocktail glass logo in 1967. We all like to think of the YMCA as a social constant — the immovable object of our childhood experience with it — but the truth is, we’re still leading the league because we’ve been willing to modify the packaging of our unchanging mission continuously to adapt to shifting societal trends and needs.

The difference between this change and the other 6 is that this one was grounded in exhaustive national research. By contrast, the somewhat apocryphal story of the creation of the cocktail glass logo revealed a much more informal approach to consequential national decisions. The story I heard — and confess to believing, since I knew most of the principals who starred in it — a few CEOs of some of our larger YMCAs were consuming adult beverages in a Chicago bar, grousing about the outdated red and blue triangle. One of the participants, apparently impressed with the simple beauty of his martini glass, sketched the now iconic logo on a cocktail napkin and said, “Hey, how about something like this?”

Who needs science when you’re three-sheets-to-the-wind?

While we (I served on various national task forces that considered the question over the past couple of years) were sorely tempted at times to seek inspiration in strong drink, we yielded to Neil’s unfailingly sober leadership. Some of the best minds in the nation on the subject of branding — Antonio Lucio (VISA), Matt Hyde (REI), Gina Boswell (Alberto-Culver) — served on the Y-USA Board and were involved deeply in this project. Their experience and expertise were complemented by professional counsel by Siegel + Gale, a communications company that has led rebranding efforts for a number of Fortune 500 firms. The results of the research, the conclusions drawn from it and the architecture of the proposed new brand strategy were run through the filter of hundreds of YMCA leaders, time and again, until we had it right and enjoyed consensus.

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“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

This timeless wisdom, from the designer of the Hindenburg, if I’m not mistaken, was the first advice offered to Neil and the Y-USA Board at the outset of this exploration. The problem was, despite the YMCA’s almost universal (greater than 90%) recognition in the general public and an equally high favorable impression of the organization in the public mind, few knew that the YMCA was anything more than an inoffensive aggregation of recreational activities. Gym-and-swim: how can you not like that? What too few knew was how the YMCA changed lives, solved social problems, knitted communities together and made the world better. Not good.

National research told us, bracingly, that there might not be anything wrong with the YMCA’s life-changing, difference-making work in 10,000 communities, but we were telling our story so disjointedly and so poorly that hardly anyone — the public, funders, policy-makers, the media and our own members — could figure out why we mattered. Not the nation’s most important community-building non-profit so much as the Nation’s Most Unintelligible Tower of Babel. Our approach to brand management was akin to a panicked crowd fleeing a burning building — every man for himself! — or a Lakers’ championship victory celebration. Just about every YMCA program director with a box of crayons and blank piece of paper had attempted to reinvent the YMCA logo...sometimes annually. Siegel + Gale had the bad manners to show us a collage of YMCA logos, building signage, brochures and business cards...then asked us if we could figure out the central theme. How rude!

YMCAs had been bellyaching for decades about not getting their fair share of attention and respect in the media — organizations doing a tiny fraction of the good work we were doing with kids were getting ten times the media play — and we finally saw the villain...in the mirror. It wasn’t our ad budget or our aspirations, it was our chaotic, disjointed message strategy.

In this jumbled mess was a message about cleaning up our national act and getting on the same page. It was an easy sell. Why we had felt the need to spend so much time, effort and money trying to make our YMCA look different than the YMCA 10 miles down the road in the next town was a mystery, but we all did it. All we succeeded in doing, in the end, was making it impossible for anyone to figure out who we were and why we were so darn important. Enough, already!

The new brand promise — Strengthening the Foundations of Community — tested like a champ. So did the three core areas of the YMCA’s focus — Youth Development, Healthy Living and Social Responsibility. The supporting messages, tested with the same audiences that previously told us they didn’t know what the YMCA actually did, served to move the YMCA to the top rank of their interest and their affections.

What we have in this brand revitalization is a way to help the world see what it’s looking at when it looks at the YMCA.

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For those of you in love with the old logo, get over it. Maybe there’s a bar in Chicago where you can hang with the old guys, scribble on some napkins and talk about how good things used to be.

The L.A. YMCA will be at the vanguard of YMCAs adopting the new logo and themes on our website, stationery, building signage, staff uniforms and publications. Jennifer Mau, our very able Vice President of Communications and Marketing, will be at the point in our conversion activities and serve as a resource to the branches. We’ve got a 30-month plan to cycle through the changes — some, like building signage and vehicle signage, take a bit longer to complete — but we’ll have the pedal to the floor on this one.

The Y-USA will be supporting the national conversion with public service announcements — check out these outstanding videos on our YouTube page: youtube.com/user/YMCALA — new graphic standards, website resources, and a ton of other help. This will be an impressive, well-coordinated effort.

For the first time in the YMCA’s long history in the U.S., we have agreed — every last independent YMCA (there are 960-some of them, like Los Angeles, and their 2,600 branches) -- that we will all tell the YMCA story in the same way: same graphics, same logo, same thematic emphases. We’ve agreed to confer the authority to the YMCA of the USA to manage the brand centrally, up to and including reminding outliers that any attempt to “improve” the logo could result in loss of standing as a member YMCA. Serious stuff, but exactly what we must do if we want to be heard and understood and appreciated by our audiences across the country.

About 60 volunteer and staff leaders from the L.A. YMCA were in Salt Lake City for the big event and the two most often used descriptors I heard from them were “exciting” and “inspirational.” I felt the same way. I came into YMCA work as a teenager attracted to the YMCA’s devotion to helping kids. I joined the career staff in 1970, because the YMCA was a cause driven movement that had the power to change the world for the better. I have stayed because I experienced the truth of that promise. The General Assembly reminded me that the YMCA will be a potent force for the good needed in the world long after I have moved on. It’s hard to tell you how good that makes me feel.

Board Chair Jim Ellison, and his wife, Naomi, were with us in Salt Lake. I missed him at the closing ceremonies, but called him the following Monday to ask him how he liked the conference. He said that he and Naomi had talked about the General Assembly for hours and shared the view that this had been one of the most inspiring experiences for them in the YMCA. Jim, a long-time nationally recognized leader in the machine tool industry, and Naomi, an active leader in the field of dentistry, both observed that they’d been to many excellent conferences in their own industries, but that, as Jim put it, “There’s something very special about going to a conference where everyone there is determined to do something to change the world.”

Be well,

Larry