“We are here to help people become professionals.
It’s not just through the knowledge or skill set. It’s the community that you’re involved in. It’s the learning experience and process.”
—William J. Hold, MBA, CRM, CISR
President and CEO
Risk & Insurance Education Alliance
The nonprofit’s rebranding captures
forward-thinking momentum and respect for the past
By Maura C. Ciccarelli
Names matter, embodying in just a few words how people should think about an organization. Choosing a new name becomes an exercise in how to reflect the firm’s evolution and expanded services while harkening back to the reputation for quality that made it so long lived.
In June, the nonprofit The National Alliance for Insurance Education & Research changed its name to the Risk & Insurance Education Alliance—or simply, “The Alliance.”
“The changes honor the proud partnerships we’ve built for decades—serving 3 million participants since our founding in 1969,” says Eduard J. Pulkstenis, CIC, CPCU, FCAS, MAAA, chair of The Alliance Research Academy Board of Directors and senior vice president and chief underwriting officer of EMC Insurance.
“We’ve also modernized our look,” he adds, “and our new name better reflects the growing importance of risk management in the lives of businesses and families, as well as in the careers of emerging industry talent.”
The name choice, says The Alliance President and CEO William J. Hold, MBA, CRM, CISR, was a result of multi-year in-depth discussions with the organization’s senior leaders and staff, educational partners, faculty, the volunteer board, and other key stakeholders.
“‘Alliance’ was retained in the nonprofit organization’s name to embody its many industry partnerships,” explains Hold, who became president and CEO three years ago, following his father, William T. Hold, Ph.D., one of The Alliance’s original founders.
“The new name was solidified once the word ‘risk’ was added,” he adds. “Anyone who has talked with college students or professionals considering a career change knows that the word ‘insurance’ by itself does not attract much interest, but add the word ‘risk,’ and you’ve captured their attention.
“In sum,” Hold notes, “our name now represents the breadth of learning opportunities we offer and the fact that mitigating risk is the industry’s overarching goal.”
“We’ve also modernized our look, and our new name better reflects the growing importance of risk management in the lives of businesses and families, as well as in the careers of emerging
industry talent.”
—Eduard J. Pulkstenis, CIC, CPCU, FCAS, MAAA
Chair, Research Academy Board of Directors
Risk & Insurance Education Alliance
The Alliance board also emphasized during the rebranding discussions that focusing on risk management for prevention as well as insurance to get businesses and people back on their feet after an event was an important way that the industry contributes to “common good,” says Hold.
Every aspect of the logo design has a meaning and purpose, as well. It now has a more dynamic and inviting shape with its “opened” triangle while it preserves the spirit of the past with its colors and three-sided shape. The logo also includes a future-forward tagline: “Own Your Potential.”
Plus, the group’s new website address—www.riskeducation.org—is easier to remember than scic.com and highlights The Alliance’s nonprofit status with the “.org” ending.
From discussion to rebranding
The National Alliance for Insurance Education & Research was launched in 1969 by a small group of Texas independent agents who created a structured curriculum and practical, real-life training that went beyond theory. Together with University of Texas educators, these agents formed the industry’s first nonprofit training and continuing education credit resource.
Today, the Austin, Texas-based Risk & Insurance Education Alliance will continue to offer its five professional designations: Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC), Certified Risk Manager (CRM), Certified Insurance Service Representative (CISR), Certified School Risk Manager (CSRM) and Certified Personal Risk Manager (CPRM).
The rebranding process has its roots pre-COVID when the staff began reviewing The Alliance’s course offerings and their delivery, which had been mostly in-person until the pandemic shutdown in 2020, says Hold.
The conversations began internally among the senior staff and expanded to formal rebranding workshops with key stakeholders facilitated by Alliance board member Peter van Aartrijk, CIC, and colleagues from his insurance marketing-communications firm, Aartrijk, based in Fairfax, Virginia.
In 2023, The Alliance’s board of directors began finalizing the new name, logo, tagline, mission, vision, values and website address. “We wanted to come out with something that really is who we are and something that we felt like people would value in the long run,” says Hold, who began with The National Alliance
18 years ago and knows how important The Alliance’s mission is for insurance professionals.
Van Aartrijk adds: “We believe you should start the brand-refresh process on the inside, and assess the culture, the core values, the mission, the vision, and the persona of the organization.” Van Aartrijk knows the insurance industry from a different perspective. He was a journalist for National Underwriter and Best Review magazines. He pursued his CIC in the 1980s to gain deeper understanding of the industry he was reporting on.
“I would not be where I am today without taking that first course and earning my CIC designation. It has made me stand out among a field of candidates and provided me with a solid foundation
of knowledge and skills.”
—Lyndsay Kooistra, CIC
Chair, CISR Board of Directors
Risk & Insurance Education Alliance
“We are here to help people become professionals,” Hold adds. “It’s not just through the knowledge or skill set. It’s the community that you’re involved in. It’s the learning experience and process. We want to help these individuals, no matter where they are in their career, to really elevate that career and to take that next step.”
While each person has to put in the time and hard work to achieve the certification or designation to improve their career, van Aartrijk says the rebranding discussions brought to the forefront that “success is a group activity,” a particularly appealing process for younger generations of workers.
Mitch Dunford, The Alliance’s chief marketing officer, adds that this community-support ethos made keeping the word “Alliance” important.
“We are not just an organization of employees,” he says. “We have so many long-standing partners out there in the industry, from our licensees to our faculty, to our ed consultants, to our board members. Every single one of our participants is really an owner of our organization. It’s a partnership with people. We literally stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Lyndsay Kooistra, CIC, chair of The Alliance’s CISR Board of Directors, agrees that the rebranding was important to do now.
“If you’re not evolving or growing, you’re stagnating and falling behind,” noted Kooistra, who earned her CIC designation in 2009 and is a shareholder at the Laporte Insurance Agency in Portland, Oregon. She was invited to serve on the CIC Education Committee for the State of Oregon in 2013 and joined the Board of Governors for CISR in 2020.
Kooistra adds: “I would not be where I am today without taking that first course and earning my CIC designation. It has made me stand out among a field of candidates and provided me with a solid foundation of knowledge and skills.”
Changing times
Even though The Alliance was already examining its brand messages and education content delivery before 2020, the pandemic changed things almost overnight. Eighty percent of The Alliance’s classes were multi-day, in-person classes and the shutdown brought that number down to zero. The Alliance staff moved fast to deliver more online content through live and recorded webinars and self-paced learning experiences, along with reference and study materials.
Because so many people found virtual learning to be very convenient, 80% of The Alliance’s classes have stayed online. In-person classes returned, which made many participants happy too, Hold says. Also, the curriculum has been revamped to be consistent across any online or in-person platform.
The Alliance’s newest offering is AlliBot, an AI-powered risk management and insurance knowledge chatbot. It’s been trained on all of The Alliance’s materials, including its Learning Guides (formerly called Notebooks), online course transcripts, and more. Plus, the system is being loaded with state-specific rules and regulations to get really granular answers for questions pitched to the bot.
“Alli has passed all the CIC exams, the CRM exams, and the CISR exams as of right now,” says Hold, noting that it’s being tested on two platforms: IBM Watson and ChatGPT-4o. “Members and subscribers will be able to ask amazing questions, such as ‘Can I form a worker’s comp captive in Wyoming?’ ‘Alli, help me write an email where a client’s policy got cancelled due to non-payment—and make it friendly.’ You can ask it about ISO forms to describe what they do, the intent, [and] endorsements to different policies.”
As a virtual “study partner,” AlliBot can generate quizzes with multiple-choice and short-answer questions. It can also function as an on-the-job assistant to support new employees, give suggestions and best practices for explaining coverages to clients, provide insights into ISO policy language, and more.
The Alliance has also created virtual reality tours showing different risk scenarios at a construction site, a barber shop, a convenience store, and a shipping warehouse. Even though it’s virtual experiential learning, “your mind doesn’t really know the difference and it can retain more information by experiencing it,” Hold says.
The future
Looking to the next 55 years, Hold says that The Alliance will continue to harness new technologies while living and advocating for the organization’s values, which include integrity, innovation, imagination and inspiration.
“We believe that in the future our core values will become even more important,” he says. “For example, integrity is going to play an essential role in the future of AI. If an organization cannot be trusted, neither will any AI tools they develop.”
Hold says the same thing applies to The Alliance’s other values, particularly imagination: “AI can do some amazing things but it does not have an imagination. It cannot create ideas out of nothing.”
For more information:
Risk & Insurance Education Alliance
riskeducation.org
The author
Maura C. Ciccarelli is a longtime freelance journalist originally from Philadelphia. She writes about business and more from an adobe home in southern New Mexico, after spending nine years traveling full time with her husband in their Airstream trailer.
