ACIS’ all new web site launched recently, and while we’re not in the habit of using this space for blatant self-promotion, it’s worth a look.

ACIS brings education alive through one-of-a-kind travel experiences. The One Simple Thing™ that powers every touch point with the brand is Insider, referring both to their intimate local knowledge of the destinations they serve, and the close family of team members, regional directors, group leaders, teachers, and students that comprise the extended ACIS family. Over the past few months we’ve helped ACIS translate that positioning into many facets of their business, from the details of their offering, to the way they engage with alumni, their catalog, and the Web.

ACIS actually approached us for help getting their social house in order a while back, and we started by helping senior execs Peter Jones and Joel Cody get up and running with simple, personal blogs. After that we set to work giving the community of travelers – always ACIS’ most potent source of new business – a voice that extended from ACIS.com into the open social networks. The application we built to do that was called Tripstream, and it was all about empowering ACIS travelers to capture and share the  experience abroad as it happened.

Tripstream v1.0 was a kind of experiment off to the side of ACIS core business, a toe in the water to see if the idea would catch on. When it did, we realized we needed to more closely integrate the voice of our travelers with the content available through ACIS.com, and a vision for the new site was born.

After a complete re-architecting of the content map and main navigation, a head-to-toe redesign, and a lot of hard work by the development team inside ACIS, the all new ACIS.com was released into the wild a few days ago.

There are many parts of this site we really like, you can poke around yourself to see them. What I’m most proud of, though, is the progress ACIS has made on it’s own journey from cautious interest to confident execution in the development of its own brand, and in the realization of that brand across physical, digital, and social touch points with the people that matter to it most.

So congratulations to Peter, Joel, Jeff, Jeff, Susan, Erin, Laura, Andres, Liz, Amanda, Caroline, Sarah and the rest of this fantastic team. We’ve come a long way indeed.