The next few months promise to be an exciting time for everyone at the Encephalitis Society as we look towards the future.

As you know, one of our key objectives is to raise awareness of encephalitis among the public and the medical profession.

With that in mind, at the end of last year we commissioned market researchers YouGov to ask the British public what it knows and does not know about encephalitis.

The figures (see below) revealed that 80 per cent of people quizzed do NOT know what encephalitis is!

For the majority of readers, this will not come as a surprise - how many people outside of your family and friends know what encephalitis is?

We have since taken a long, hard look to see what could be done to change those figures and make sure encephalitis has the same name recognition as Motor Neurone Disease and meningitis.

One area we have looked at is the Encephalitis Society logo as we want it to fully reflect who we are and what we do.

We spent several months working with designers to come up with a new design which you can see.

Your new logo features the image of a brain so that people can see immediately that it is a condition affecting the brain. We have retained the jigsaw pieces from the old logo as the message they convey – “helping to put the pieces back together” – is something we deeply believe in.

Refreshing the logo is an important step towards raising awareness of encephalitis and the feedback we have had so far has been very positive.

Dr Ava Easton, our Chief Executive, said:

It is always a nervy time when you replace something of which many people have become fond, but we truly believe our new logo is a step forward for the Society and our work in raising awareness.

It will be rolled out slowly over the next few months. It is very much an ongoing process and we can promise many more exciting developments to come.