Best of CASE District VI Award
 

Institution: Metropolitan State University of Denver

Title of entry: RED reboot

About this entry: RED (red.msudenver.edu), the official online newsroom launched in 2018 as the anchor of the University’s brand-journalism storytelling strategy. The site hosts authentic, journalistically crafted stories that are “relevant and essential” to Denver and the state of Colorado, leveraging University experts, students, alumni and community partners as sources.

While the platform appeals to a broad, general audience, including University stakeholders, business and civic leaders, alumni, students and prospective students, our primary target audience is news media. Our goal: to inspire earned media and expand the reach of our stories and messaging through impactful journalistic storytelling.

Our initial implementation of this approach and platform was successful by many measures – including growth in earned media and traffic from organic search. However, overall traffic declined over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, website design and functionality had not changed since the site’s initial launch, and a reader survey and other feedback indicated it was time for a RED relaunch. We set out to develop a more modern and useful site alongside a refined content strategy based on lessons learned over the previous four years.

The new RED site successfully launched on March 22, 2022, accompanied a couple of weeks later by a refreshed bi-weekly newsletter that delivers site content to 55,000 subscribers.

Since then, traffic and page views have nearly doubled, both increasing by more than 90% over the previous year. Likewise, earned media inspired by RED stories (using RED content for proactive pitching) increased 87%, expanding reach exponentially.