Pin. It’s a noun and a verb. It’s the act of bringing things together and holding them together. And it is the object that makes those actions possible.
Christine Oldfield believes PIN, the People and Information Network, is a most appropriate new name for the Volunteer Centre of Guelph/Wellington. The name has just been unveiled following a lengthy branding process undertaken by Guelph-based The Letter M Marketing. It will be rolled out over the next few months.
The organization connects many people and organizations in a variety of ways, and serves as a link between people and the information they need. PIN’s main focus is helping people engage in their community in a way that is meaningful to them.
Oldfield, PIN executive director, said the old name no longer reflected the services and supports the organization was providing to Guelph and Wellington County. While coordinating volunteers and matching them with the needs of local organizations is a big part of what PIN does, it also helps people in the region find the essential community services they need, and works to ensure best practices and continuous learning for professionals in the non-profit sector. And while it does have a central location, it is not a centre so much as a network.
To better connect all that it does to the broader community, a name change was necessary. And while the name has changed, the services have not.
“It speaks to our connecting people to things,” Oldfield said in an interview. “We connect people to organizations through volunteering, we connect people to information when they need services, and we connect people to professional development. The idea of a pin attaching things or bringing things together makes sense as an analogy and a name. And it’s a groovy acronym.”
The name better summarizes what the organization does, she said.
“I feel that our previous name, the Volunteer Centre, really latched onto one aspect of what we did – volunteerism,” she said. “But there was all the work that we do around information referral that wasn’t captured in the name. As well as all we do around leadership, in terms of convening communities of practice like executive directors and volunteer managers, and creating workshop events for people to come to learn about non-profit volunteer management.”
Those other vital aspects of the organization were hidden in the name Volunteer Centre of Guelph/Wellington, she added. The old name also didn’t convey PIN’s recruit and refer approach to matching volunteers to organizations, she added.
“We are a space and we have an office, but a lot of what we do is done virtually, in the digital space or over the phone,” she added. “Most of the people accessing our services do not physically enter our office.”
She called the renaming exercise an involved process. Numerous stakeholder interviews were conducted, as were two surveys, one a survey of the organization’s membership.
“We wanted to make sure that people had an opportunity to have a say,” she said.
She added that PIN aspires to be much more than a place where someone comes to find a volunteer opportunity. The new name also captures that sense of aspiration.
Visit the People and Information Network website to learn more about what it does and hopes to do.
