Best of CASE District II Award
 

Institution: Wilfrid Laurier University

Title of entry: Confronting a Fiery Future

About this entry: “Confronting a Fiery Future” showcases the research of Jennifer Baltzer, the Canada Research Chair in Forests and Global Change at Wilfrid Laurier University. As wildfires intensify across the Northwest Territories, she is working with local partners to protect forest ecosystems and surrounding communities.

Baltzer’s research was featured in the first phase of Laurier’s integrated marketing and communication campaign “Inspired Research. REAL IMPACT.” The campaign’s objective was to enhance Laurier’s reputation for research excellence among key audiences, including government officials, academics and prospective partners.

In order to gather creative for the campaign, members of Laurier’s External Relations team travelled to Yellowknife in the summer of 2022 to document Baltzer and her partners conducting field research. Supported by cinematic visuals, a feature-length article was written to describe the urgency of this scholarship at a time when Canada’s North is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the planet.

The article was accompanied by a short-form documentary video, produced in collaboration with Memory Tree Productions, and promoted to target audiences through print and digital advertisements, and organic social media posts. Content from the article was pitched to journalists and resulted in notable national media coverage, including on TVO’s The Agenda and CBC’s Quirks and Quarks.

Laurier’s multimedia storytelling approach proved to be successful, with more than 300,000 total video views and 1,700 pageviews of the feature article. Readers spent an average of seven minutes and 52 seconds on the article page, indicating a deep engagement with the content.