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Case study
The elected voice of the Kootenays, rebranded and rebuilt.
Brand
Website Design
Website Development
Digital Infrastructure
A full rebrand and website rebuild for the association that represents thirty local governments across the Kootenay and Boundary region. We drew a new identity from the mountains, water and sun already in their name, then built it into a low maintenance open source platform their own small team runs, convention after convention.
Detail
Where it started
The Association of Kootenay and Boundary Local Governments has been the elected voice of the Kootenays since November 1933. It speaks for more than 175 elected officials across thirty local governments, from the smallest village in the province to the largest city in the region, and it answers to all of them.
The website they had could not carry that. It was dated and cluttered, with three different versions of the logo on a single page and a wall of stock photography sitting behind everything. For residents it was a slow way to find a resolution or a set of minutes. For the small team running it, most changes meant asking someone else for help.
They came to us for two things at once. Clean up the brand, and rebuild the site on something they could actually run themselves.
Field note
From cluttered to calm
The old homepage buried its content under a full-bleed mountain photograph and a grid of stock tiles, none of which told you what the association does.
The rebuild gives them a clear front page instead: who they are, what is happening next, and the documents people actually arrive looking for. Same organization, same warmth, far less noise.
Detail
A new identity
The old mark was a literal little illustration, a green mountain and a small sun sitting off to the side of the letters, set in a brown serif that had aged badly. It was doing three things at once and none of them clearly.
The new one folds the region into the word itself:
- The A becomes the mountain, so the peak and the letterform are the same shape
- The sun rises behind it as a clean disc instead of a drawn scene
- The water runs under the whole wordmark in one continuous swoosh
- The letters graduate from deep blue through teal into green, water to forest
- Outfit replaces the old serif, and a seven colour palette now carries across the site, the documents and the convention material
Detail
Built to stay simple
The brief for the platform was ownership rather than features. WordPress, open source, hosted wherever they need it hosted, and as few plugins as we could get away with. Every dependency is one more thing a volunteer board has to worry about in five years.
So most of the site is ours: a custom theme, a block library the staff assemble pages from, and content types for the things this association actually keeps. Members, life members, executives, convention sponsors, conventions and events, each with a place to live and a template that already knows how to display it.
Field note
The year runs itself
An association like this runs on a calendar. A convention is announced, a program goes up, resolutions are posted, the membership votes, then outcomes and minutes get filed and it all begins again the following April.
That whole cycle belongs to them. They open a new convention year, publish the program, post the workbook and archive the minutes without a developer anywhere in the loop. Ninety three conventions in, the site keeps up on its own.
Measured outcomes
The association, by the numbers
Scope rather than scoreboard. This is the organization the site has to hold.
- 1933
- the year the association was founded
- 30
- local governments represented, across five regional districts
- 175+
- elected officials the association speaks for
- 93
- annual conventions, the most recent in Trail
- 16
- years of AGM minutes kept public, back to 2008
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Detail
Not our first local government
The AKBLG is one of several public bodies we build for in British Columbia. We also rebuilt the main website for the Regional District of Central Kootenay, one of the association's own member governments, along with RDCK Engage, their public engagement platform. Read the RDCK case study for a much larger version of the same problem.
In closing
A brand they can be proud of
Local government work is rarely glamorous. It is agendas, resolutions, minutes and notices, published on time, for people who need to find them. The best things we could hand the AKBLG were an identity that looks current and a website their own team can keep that way.
