STFM Blog

Jeri Hepworth, PhD, STFM President, & Stacy Brungardt, CAE, STFM Executive Director

Thanks to all of you who have commented on our logo drafts. As we discussed at the Board meeting, your input is an important part of our vetting process.

Please allow us to clarify this process.

The current logo has served us well, without question. It is a statement to members about our values.  However, as we increase our role with others, an internally-focused logo is not useful and can be detracting. Our role in medical education, transformation of health care, and advocacy work with governmental bodies and other professional organizations requires us to move forward with communications and messaging that convey the importance of the Society. Our recent communications audit tells us that others outside our membership (and even some within) don’t see our logo as one that communicates a professional, progressive organization. We celebrate our current logo, its history, and our founders who developed it. A new logo doesn’t undermine or ignore that history.

Your comments are part of an important vetting process that includes our membership, Board, and staff. The two logos that were presented are not the final logo choices, and we have not spent extravagantly in the design process.

Here’s what we are learning from our feedback gathering process.

1. Our members read our communications. Within 24 hours, 1,522 of you had opened the email, 689 had clicked through to the web page, and 701 had clicked through to President Jeri Hepworth’s blog post. It’s good to know our messages are reaching you.
2. Our members are engaged and feel a real connection to STFM. If you weren’t connected, you obviously wouldn’t care what our logo says/looks like.
3. Your suggestions are constructive. You didn’t just say, “I don’t like it,” you explained why, and provided recommendations. Overall, we didn’t get the sense that most of you are opposed to change, per se, you just don’t like the change direction.

We wish we could sit down with all of you and have a conversation to listen, learn, and discuss. It’s clear that many of you want a family symbol in the logo, and we understand how important the family and the relationships it represents mean to STFM. But, we’ve also had members tell us that the definition of family is changing, and the three-person image is not inclusive of all families.

If we show a family, how does that image differentiate us from, say, a family services agency, a church, a community park, or a YMCA? If we add a medical symbol to the family, perhaps we’re then showing family medicine, but that seems like it might make more sense for an AAFP logo. We’re really about education, so do we add a book or an apple to the family and medical symbol? That would be one busy logo.

Then, consider the logos for organizations that have probably invested mega-bucks for logo research. How do golden arches visually represent cheap hamburgers? And what does Walmart’s star/flower say about discount retail? Wouldn’t a picture of a car be a more literal logo for Mercedes than a triangle? Do we really need to repeat what’s in our organization’s name in images?

Logo design principles say logos should be simple, relevant, scalable, and memorable. Your feedback indicates we may have missed the mark on “relevant.” So, we ask you to continue to share your comments, below. This is a process and everyone at STFM is listening closely to what you’re saying.

Jeri Hepworth, PhD STFM President

In October, your STFM Board of Directors asked staff to move forward with development of a new logo. I have to admit an affinity for our current logo. It’s friendly and comfortable, like STFM. It conveys our emphasis on family. However, it’s also dated and hard to read and doesn’t reflect the progressive, innovative organization STFM has become. In fact, during a recent communications audit, STFM members described the figures as play-dough people, aliens, and gingerbread men. And while we may like our 40-year-old play-dough people, they don’t communicate the level of professionalism earned by STFM and family medicine education.

Our messages to Congress point out the need for innovation in primary care training. Our new strategic plan challenges us to be the authority for innovation and research in family medicine education. Innovation is what’s driving family medicine education; our logo needs to send this same message.

I’m excited about the new doors that will be opened with the launch of a new logo. A “rebranding” campaign provides a rare opportunity to raise our profile and let our government, our colleagues, our students, and our patients know about the work we do to prepare the doctors who care for families. This is our chance to communicate that innovative family medicine education is the foundation of the health care system.

I invite you to be a part of the transformation. Shoot me an e-mail, or post a comment here to let me know what you think about the work we’re doing and the direction we’re taking. And please take a few minutes to vote on which logo you feel best represents the professionalism you and your colleagues bring to your job every day.

Stacy Brungardt, CAE STFM Executive Director

Have you ever become so immersed in a project that you looked past items critical to the initiative’s success? My recent example of this is feedback I received on the STFM strategic plan. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the plan, but when our Foundation Trustees, who had not been involved in creating the document, reviewed the plan, the document failed to communicate the breadth, external linkages, or the importance of the initiatives the goals and strategies listed in the document.

What helpful feedback, particularly since we are in the early stages of communicating the plan to our members! To begin to address this, STFM President Jeri Hepworth, PhD, identified the larger themes that are implicit within our strategic plan. Check it out.

That brings up a key challenge for our staff and leadership. Combined, STFM and the STFM Foundation have more than 40 (yes, I counted) active programs and initiatives. We have liaisons to or are partnering with more than 20 organizations. How do we effectively keep our leaders, members, and even staff current on all these initiatives? That’s a tall order, but it’s one we are trying to tackle. Sharing expanded information on Board meeting discussions is one step among several tactics to demonstrate the important work that is happening within STFM. We’re working to make STFM communications vehicles tell more of our stories. Stay tuned.

Thank you for making the choice to be a member of STFM. It is an honor to serve you and the values you represent.