UK Charity “Homeless International” With an annual budget £20 million Rebrands To An .XYZ

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Homeless International a .UK based charity with an annual budget £20 million announced they havere-branded from Homeless-International.org to Reall.xyz

The NGO has been around since 1989 “focusing on urban poverty issues (including slums and social housing) in the developing world”

The charity has its own Wikipedia.org page

Here is some info from the press release:

“Since 2010, our annual budget to accelerate sustainable housing development in Africa and Asia has increased tenfold to approximately £20 million.

With this, we have been able to increase the number of households helped from 1,000 in 2010 to 20,000 so far this year. We now operate in 20 countries through 26 entrepreneurial and inspiring community organisations.

As our funding has grown, so too have our aspirations. We want to make a bigger and lasting impact on a problem that affects one in seven people alive today. To do that, we are making some changes – and we have started with our name.

‘Homeless International’ has served us well, but it no longer adequately reflected the enterprising work we do.

As we reach out to an ever-expanding number of the urban poor across the world, it is time for us to establish an identity that encapsulates the solutions we aim to provide and not just the problems we aim to tackle.

Reall – or Real Equity for All – is not just a new name. Reall represents a new way of looking at how our organisation operates, how we work and what we do.

What will Reall help us to do?

… Create greater scale
One self-sustaining enterprise can finance and build up to 5,000 houses per year. That’s a fantastic figure, but it’s still only a start. More than 200,000 people arrive in cities every day and more than 90% of them are forced to settle in slums. To address the burgeoning demand for affordable, safe, long-term housing, there is an urgent need for thousands of such enterprises.

The Reall social franchise model will give us this scale and allows us to seed networks of community organisations in dozens of cities worldwide. We will be in the forefront of developing urban slum housing enterprises.

… Build more enterprises, not just houses
Our goal is to establish a global network of independent, self-financing community development enterprises that are capable of serving existing slum communities. As Reall becomes an established, recognised and respected approach, Reall community organisations will have a louder voice to gain access to:

– Local governments, to become part of the institutional fabric of a city and have a say in future housing policy and practice

– Local financial institutions, to benefit from affordable, sustainable sources of working capital and banking services

– The network of institutional investors that Reall will develop across the world to provide affordable long-term, recoverable debt or equity investments

… Deliver development, not just aid
By leveraging the Reall network, we will be better able to empower our partners to build sustainable enterprises – capable of financing and maintaining affordable housing over the long term – thanks to a worldwide transfer of skills, knowledge, education and shared experiences.

… Attract investment
Looking forward, Reall aims to create a marketplace in which housing for the urban poor is an investment class. As the network of Reall enterprises gains traction and motivates our partners to collaborate with one another, it will generate a favourable investment climate. Ultimately the intention is to gain access to commercial sources of finance that, by generating surpluses, profits and returns for funders, will prove a lasting source of funding for Reall to deliver development.

… Engender confidence among the world’s urban poor communities
Over the next year, the organisations we support will be invited to adopt the Reall brand as a mark of assurance or a stamp of quality and integrity that demonstrates our network’s shared values, standards and systems. Every partner organisation, whatever its size or location, has a chance to become a partner in a global network.

What’s next?
On Wednesday 17 September 2014, our name officially changed to Reall.

We believe Reall will have the most meaningful, long-term and far-reaching impact on slums to have ever been initiated and we are excited and invigorated at the opportunities ahead of us.

 

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  4. George Kirikos says

    LOL.There’s a re-branding disaster for the textbooks. hahahaha Check back in a year, to see if they’re sticking with (1) a weak name on the left of the dot, *and* (2) a weak name on the right of the dot.

    Even the most feverish new gTLDs advocates positioned them as a way to “finally” get the “name they wanted”, presumably making reference to just the left of the dot name. Here, Homeless International didn’t even bother to pick a strong brand to the left of the dot, and compounded their mistake by getting suckered into a .xyz rather than .org or .com or .uk. Actually, it looks like they did get reall.org.uk, but then redirect it to the .xyz.

    This name fails the radio test, telephone test, and is weak on so many levels. I feel sorry for them. With that poor decision making on a URL, it makes one wonder what other poor decision-making they’re capable of……

    • Mallory English says

      Larry English, the CEO of REALL. I remember him telling me about the .XYZ thing casually over breakfast – he thought it was pretty unusual and funny, and a bit different, it wasn’t much of a big deal. It’s a shame you feel sorry for people who are changing lives – but then I suppose you think domain names are important in the #firstworldproblems bubble you live in.
      The thing is, you can take REALLdotwhatever – I hardly think my dad would care. Because I’ve grown up watching my dad spend his entire career providing thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of homes for the homeless and lose sleep over the stress of making sustainability a real thing.
      REALL was his vision, and vision is one domain you clearly don’t have have in your life
      The rebranding company is one of the best in South Africa, whose returning clients include Coca-Cola, Dove, Toyota, Unilever, Kellogs etc. My dad knows exactly what he’s doing. In fact @George Kirikos, I suppose their “bad decisions” must be the reason they have a projection of £100 million in funding by 2020 (completely free of government grants) were awarded the 2013 UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour Award, provided housing for 170,000 people, improved access to water, toilets and plumbing for over 500,000 people, and secured land for nearly two million. And that hasn’t slowed since their rebranding.
      My dad has bigger fish to fry then to worry about how popular/in demand a domain address they have. The people that need them don’t have internet, telephones, and don’t often speak English anyway. So take the domain name, because my dad is far too busy helping people with real problems to care what a bunch of self-serving internet pricks think of their rebranding. He’s the reason their annual budget went from 2 mil to 20 million in 5 years. He can change the branding or domain address a million times, it won’t matter, because he has vision. Likelihood is you’ll make some money, but at the end of the day my dad and his “re-branding disaster” will still have done more for society than you ever will. Let me know when you’ve changed as many lives as my dad has and then we can talk “bad decisions”.

      • George Kirikos says

        Mallory: It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a horrible domain name. You suggest your dad doesn’t care, but clearly they already regret the choice.

        If they were truly happy with reall.xyz, explain to me why they acquired reall.net in February 2015 (which is *after* the .xyz “rebranding”) and are using reall.net as the URL as the current link in their Twitter account? You assert that your dad has “bigger fish to fry”, yet they went out and spent good money months later to try to offset the confusion brought about by a poor branding decision, and to “upgrade” to a dot-net from the .xyz. My guess is they’ll continue to seek an improvement (perhaps we’ll see reall.org and/or reall.com be acquired in due course).

        As I predicted below, someone else has already registered the .co.uk version.

        • George Kirikos says

          P.S. If you think “Teall” isn’t confusing to the left of the dot, consider the fact that:

          1) folks need to explain it constantly (i.e. “Real Equity for All” is regularly used next to the name)
          2) even folks connected to the organization make mistakes using the name. Your dad’s LinkedIn profile has contact info which links to http://www.real.net (i.e. he forgot the 2nd “l” to the left of the dot, and is using the .net version, instead of the .xyz version to the right of the dot). Real.net is owned by someone else.

          If your own dad, the CEO of the organization, can make that mistake, what percentage of your prospective donors, who are less familiar with the brand, are ending up at the wrong website? How much money is Reall losing if folks give up because they can’t find the correct website to donate? Folks here were you doing Reall a service, pointing out that a bad branding decision has a real impact.

    • Konstantinos Zournas says

      RealEquityforAll.com is gone too.
      I was sure that would happen when I posted my comment.
      People pay for their mistakes and ignorance. And they pay when they choose the wrong consultants or when they think they know everything.