Rebranding the UJC

We first told you about this in June. Now it’s official. On Tuesday UJC’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved a new name and a new logo for the organization:

The Jewish Federations of North America.

According to UJC, “As part of an ongoing effort to create a stronger continental brand and market positioning for the Federation system, and based on market research, UJC is changing its name to align with and reflect the Jewish Federations’ naming.

The new name builds on strength of familiarity of local Jewish Federations, aligns with 90 percent of local Federations’ names, and reflects the best practices of other large federated non-profits.

… The new name and logo will begin to be rolled out publicly at the 2009 General Assembly (GA) Nov 8-10 in Washington, D.C.”

We wonder – will the rebranding effort be simple, or will the UJC moniker stick around for quite a while. How will employees, the media and the broader community refer to the organization? After all, the Jewish world loves initials!

With the rebranding, the ujc.org website could be rebranded as thejewishfederationsofnorthamerica.org. And emails could then be addressed to your.name@thejewishfederationsofnorthamerica.org.

After all, one of UJC’s partner agencies included this sentence in an email yesterday announcing the name change, “There are no initials to be used. Please be sure to always use this new name in all correspondence and on all documents.”

Careful, watch your spelling.

Only time will tell whether this was a prudent decision.