“It’s not what you do, it’s why you do it. “ – Simon Sinek
(PSSSSSST – this is our second blog post in this series, please click here to start at the beginning of our story!)
Welcome to the FIRST Indiana Robotics community. As the President of FIRST Indiana Robotics, I have the great pleasure of re-introducing you to our organization, mission, and guiding principles. A series of introductory blog posts will breakdown the rebranding and re-introduction of FIRST Indiana Robotics into bite-sized pieces.
Why Rebrand?
FIRST Indiana Robotics believes our future is built better together and improving our world starts with our youth. This fall, our organization became the official program delivery partner for the FIRST LEGO League Junior and FIRST Tech Challenge Programs. While we’ve managed the FIRST Robotics Competition Program for the last five years as IndianaFIRST, with the addition of these new programs it is time for our organization to “de-silo” and build a community between the three programs. This was the catalyst for our re-introduction to you. Our goal is to become one FIRST, not three separate FIRSTs, so we can work together with you to build the future and inspire our youth.
Name & Logo
It took some time to determine what name we should use as part of this re-introduction. While FIRST Indiana would be the obvious choice, this was too close to the name of other organizations in the state (this was the same problem with “FIRST in Indiana”). FIRST Indiana Robotics was the next option, and ultimately what we decided to adopt. Since FIRST Indiana Robotics is 22 characters long, we will use “FIN” as an abbreviation where appropriate, i.e. “FIN District – St. Joseph” or “FIN Expo – Perry Meridian”.
As you can see, our new FIRST Indiana Robotics (FIN) logo is aligned with FIRST Headquarters branding and design standards found here.
We welcome all of our teams to use the new FIRST Indiana Robotics logo on your team t-shirts, banners, websites, etc. A folder with the new FIN logos can be found here, please adhere to the FIRST branding and design standards when using our community logo.
How can you stay in touch?
FIRST Indiana Robotics is too long to use in social media and FIN isn’t unique enough. Therefore we have abbreviated Indiana to IN and will use the following as our social media handles @FIRSTINRobotics and #FIRSTINRobotics.
You can find @FIRSTINRobotics via the following social media sites:
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| FIRSTIndianaRobotics | @FIRSTINRobotics | @FIRSTINRobotics |
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| FIRST Indiana Robotics | FIRST Indiana Robotics | FIRST Indiana Robotics |
Rebranding takes time, so our goal is to complete the rebrand of the organization over the course of the next year and fully transition to the use of all new names and logos by December 31st, 2020.
We would love for you to help us rebrand! When you see an old logo, grab a photo of it and tag @FIRSTINRobotics on social media with the hashtag #INFThrowBack. Share an inspiring story from your time in IndianaFIRST!
Our next blog post will breakdown our Purpose, Mission, and Vision for FIRST Indiana Robotics to provide additional background.
Renee Becker-Blau
President of FIRST Indiana Robotics