Best of CASE District VIII Award
 

Institution: University of Alberta

Title of entry: A Nobel Search

About this entry: How do you celebrate a Nobel Prize at your institution? Once the news stories and online celebrations are over, what more can you do to help your community feel like they are part of this incredible achievement? In this case, it was the second issue where we celebrated this Nobel Prize win, so the “Nobel” portion of the story was deliberately understated. We also knew that our Nobel laureate, Micheal Houghton, felt very strongly that the work and the team should be highlighted, rather than him being the main focus of the story.

So, for the Spring 2021 issue of New Trail, we put the reader in the middle of it all with a “quest” story.

We took the reader on the journey of ups and downs of the seven-year hunt to identify a mystery virus with incredibly high stakes; the disease infected 150 million people worldwide. Our goal was to get readers invested in this research and highlight the challenges and the years involved in making world-changing discoveries. We wanted to help our grads understand this is key to building a community of advocates who value long-term research.

A survey of our donors shows they are most likely to think about universities when they want to support long-term societal change. Research like the hepatitis C research, which can be the sum of one person’s entire career, is a great illustration of the value of research universities like the University of Alberta and why they are deserving of philanthropic investment.