New Image Wins the Gold

Coming from an organization that won awards for its publications, Anthony Snyder, ASHI’s new director of marketing and membership, was quick to recognize the potential of ASHI’s publications and entered several of them in the Association Trends All-Media contest. Apparently, Snyder has an eye for excellence.

Bringing home the Gold

In December 2004, the ASHI Reporter and the ASHI exhibit booths won the Gold Medal for excellence.  

In addition to placing first in the Professional Society Magazine and Promotional Exhibition Booths categories, the Society earned silver for its Web site, and bronze for the ASHI Collection-Winter 2004, The ASHI Experience print ads and the ASHI Inspector Toolkit.

Building a unified image

The awards were especially gratifying because the ASHI staff has worked to build a new, unified graphic image–an image that successfully melds the branding-initiative templates from Publicis Dialogue with in-house design into a new image.
Confirming the power of the emerging brand identity

Earning gold medals for the in-house-designed ASHI Reporter and the consultant-designed ASHI Experience exhibit booths confirmed the power of the emerging brand identity. Through the use of specific colors and consistent graphic elements, the ASHI Web site and all publications now present a professional image, an image that supports the ASHI brand.

Our flagship monthly magazine, the Reporter, lead the way with its new full four-color design, bleed pages and expanding editorial content, which increased ad revenues and, we hope, did the same for readers’ enjoyment. By including the consultant-recommended typefaces and color palette in the Reporter’s evolving design, the magazine now personifies the ASHI image.

In addition to the Reporter, marketing brochures—the consumer brochure, the technical brochures and more—were redesigned to be user-friendly and consistent with the brand.
InspectionWorld brochures; First Thing, the leadership newsletter; and even ASHI stationery were updated. The result—a professional visual image that matches the professionalism of the ASHI membership.

The importance of image

Judy Delvoye, ASHI’s graphic manager, described the importance of image in the November 2004 issue of The Forum, the monthly magazine published by the Association Forum of Chicagoland. Known as the “association of associations,” Association Forum draws its membership of 3,000 CEOs and staff professionals from 1,500 national, state and local not-for-profit organizations, plus vendors of goods and services.

“There is no escaping the power of the first impression,” she wrote in the article “Who are you? Creating a visual identity puts a face on your association.”

Graphic artists seldom are asked to craft a message with words instead of images; nevertheless, Delvoye had welcomed the invitation to write an article for the magazine on using visual identity to communicate an organization’s strengths. “By developing a visual identity for your association, you’ll be communicating the strengths of your organization at the most basic level,” she said.

Little did she know when she wrote about the value of creating a consistent and powerful image that ASHI’s success in melding the consultant-contributed ASHI booths, Web site and Toolkit with the in-house de-signed Reporter, and Winter Collection catalogue, would receive the stamp of approval from Association Trends.

Committed

Awards aside, ASHI staff understands image is as fluid as it as powerful; therefore, they remain committed to providing the Society with an evolving, yet coherent, professional visual identity—one that reinforces ASHI’s position as the voice of the profession.