This week saw a change at ECS House. To start with a little history, Eastleigh Community Services was where my charity, Solent Youth Action, started. We began as a project ran by ECS, and we’re still physically based in ECS House – renting some office space from them since we became independent. So even though we are now independent, we still watch what happens to ECS with interest.
This week was the launch of their rebranding – including a change of name to “One Community”. I’d heard of the planned name change a little while ago, but I hadn’t seen the new logo or tagline yet.
It looks pretty good – I don’t know if they got a professional design agency to do it for them, but it looks like they might have. And they’ve got off to a good start using it. A new sign appeared outside the ECS offices, and above the ECS charity shop in town. I haven’t seen any of their minibuses since the rebranding yet, though.
I don’t know the background behind the name change, but I have to assume that they would have had a good reason to do it. ECS was a well-established and locally a well-known brand – not something that you would want to give up lightly.
I can only assume that losing “Eastleigh” from their name was the important bit – perhaps as a part of an overall plan to expand into surrounding areas, or because they felt that being identified with “Eastleigh” was too limiting in the activities they could do or the funds they could apply for.
This sort of thing can have a big impact on a small organisation, and we chose “Solent” carefully for our name because of this. Solent is specific enough that it helps to identify a new and unknown organisation, but vague enough that it gives us some flexibility as we grow over the first few years.
It will be interesting to see if the ECS rebranding will be followed quickly with any changes in their activities.