After months of collaborative work, RCMA leadership last week officially launched the association’s new logo, as well as the positioning statement that inspired it:
“RCMA is the proven faith-based association for meeting planners and suppliers, nurturing a community that inspires exceptional meetings.”
“We are reintroducing the association as the leading organization for faith-based meetings,” explains Melvin Tennant, CAE, vice president of RCMA’s board and president and CEO of Meet Minneapolis. Tennant also heads RCMA’s first-ever marketing committee, which has focused much of its effort on the rebranding process.
Tennant clarifies that the difference between a positioning statement and a mission statement is that the former is aspirational, telling “who we want to be,” whereas the latter is more tactical, describing, “what we aim to do.”
In board and committee meetings over the last seven months, “We had some pretty intense discussions to determine who we are, fundamentally, as an organization,” Tennant recalls.
There was great consensus that RCMA needs to become a community, he says, one where people inspire each other and where they interact throughout the year, not just at the annual meeting. It wasn’t too far down the road from arriving at this awareness that the group was able to come up with an elegantly simple positioning statement.
For an in-depth look at the process behind RCMA’s rebranding effort, check out the cover story of the October issue of Religious Conference Manager.