As we’ve explained in a previous post, we’ve been helping build a community around Open Recognition and Open Badges. This community was originally called ‘Keep Badges Weird’ but, more recently, we’ve settled on a more inclusive name: ‘Open Recognition is for Everybody’. Communities evolve and sometimes they need to be more comprehensive. This might require a new name and new brand. This post outlines how we went about this rebranding to prevent confusion and to ensure we took people with us as we made changes.

We hope that our experience and lessons learned might be able to help you on your own journey of community rebranding.

To start things of it is helpful to capture your communities journey so far and introduce the idea of rebranding to ensure that it is going to be a collective and communal decision. Ask for ideas and let community members share their thoughts.

Community development timeline

After deciding on a new name, it is time to start spreading the word and also explain why you decided on this particular new name. Tell a story because with every step you take you should ensure to bring as many people with you as you can. Explain the process and be transparent. Do this by talking to the community in discussion threads and announcements. Talk about it on the social networks and share postings with background information that you can later refer to when talking about the rebranding.

After sharing the changes that are coming, start by using both brands together, so that people begin to associate the new name with the actual community. This will help ease the transition. Make sure that nobody gets lost during rebranding. If your community is active, new members will join after hearing the old name!

Test your new brand

During this rebrand, Participate launched a beta version of their new platform. This gave us the opportunity to build an ORE Community on the new platform to begin testing out not just the platform but also the new brand. We encourage you to do same if you can and get people involved in a test run for your new brand. Show them what the new design is going to look like and how the brand is going to feel like. Invite people to give you feedback and make sure that community members are involved into the process.

Image CC BY-ND Bryan Mathers

Transition slowly

After a few months of testing, announcing and preparing, it will be time to remove the old brand and switch everything to the new one. If you’ve moved slowly enough, most community members will have heard about the changes and understand why things are starting to look different. Remember that some community members might only login once per week or once per month, so what feels slow to you might feel like a very fast change to them!

For Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE), we used the summer/winter break in August while the community was less busy. We changed the name, the images and also all descriptions to include a brief history of the name change. This is to help people who might be looking for the community under its old name. It is also important to check your external resources and change the name there. For us this has been badge.wiki entries and our community call events over at lu.ma as well as other bits and pieces.

Keep gathering feedback

Once you’ve launched your new brand and switched out assest, you will want to make sure that you haven’t missed anything. Once again, we recommend engaging with the community and asking them to reach out if they find the old brand in a resource or webpage. You might also invite people to continue giving feedback as you spread your new brand.

We want to thank everybody in the ORE community who gave feedback and helped develop the new brand over the past months. We’re looking forward to using our more inclusive brand for a good long while :)

If you have stories about community rebranding, please add them in the comments so we can all learn together. If you’d like to join the ORE community, head to https://badges.community