Get ready to Explore Lawrence.

The Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau plans to abandon its longtime name and instead become known as Explore Lawrence, the interim director that is overseeing the agency has confirmed.

Megan Gilliland, the city of Lawrence’s communications manager and the interim director for the nonprofit group that oversees the CVB, said the idea of a convention and visitors bureau can sometimes be hard for the average traveler to understand.

“Explore Lawrence is an action-oriented phrase,” Gilliland said. “It calls people to do something.”

Gilliland has been serving as the interim director for Destination Management Inc. — the umbrella group that manages both the CVB and the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area — since February. Gilliland said previous director Fred Conboy submitted his resignation in February. She said she’s been focusing on keeping major projects, like the rebranding of the CVB, moving ahead.

“This has been a pretty big project in the pipeline,” Gilliland said.

The biggest change as part of the new name will be a new website that will be completely redesigned. Gilliland said the website will have a focus on making it easy for visitors and residents alike to find events and attractions in Lawrence and Douglas County.

“We think the website will be the crown jewel of the project,” Gilliland said. “The great thing is there is never a weekend with a lack of things to do here.”

Gilliland said more details about the launch of the website will be released in the next few weeks.

Conboy’s departure from Destination Management is the second leader of the tourism industry to leave in recent months. The Convention and Visitors Bureau has been without a full-time director since late 2013, when director Christina Phelps resigned. At the time, Conboy said he expected to have a new director in place by mid-2014. But the position was never filled, and Conboy ended up serving in both the CVB and Destination Management Inc. roles. Whether leaders now will seek to fill both positions isn’t clear. Gilliland said a timeline hasn’t been established for hiring a full-time director for Destination Management Inc. She said board members for DMI want to continue to do more strategic planning for the organization, especially in the area of fundraising through grants, corporations and individual sponsorships.

“They recognize there needs to be a way to take that organization to the next level financially,” Gilliland said.

Gilliland said she was uncertain whether the board also would have discussions about whether the Convention and Visitors Bureau should remain under the umbrella of Destination Management Inc. or become its own entity. For decades, the CVB was part of the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, but separated from that organization as work began to create the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area, which is a multicounty organization that covers parts of eastern Kansas and western Missouri.

Gilliland said there have been signs that the local tourism industry is on an upswing. The city collects a 6 percent tax on motel and hotel rooms in the city limits, and collections for that guest tax were up sharply in 2014.

The latest report shows that 2014 collections totaled $1.45 million, up from $1.19 million in 2013 and $1.18 million in 2012.

“When you hear people talk about Lawrence, there is a lot of interest in the community,” Gilliland said. “We work hard to sell the entire experience of Lawrence.”