Best of CASE District VIII Award
 

Institution: The University of British Columbia

Title of entry: My Town: Reflecting UBC's global alumni community

About this entry: In 2022, The University of British Columbia Magazine (UBC Magazine) launched My Town, a digital story series that relies on alumni-generated content to connect UBC graduates with one another. Structured as a Q&A, each My Town story features an alum who lives in a unique part of the world and whose responses and photos provide a personal glimpse into what their city is like.

Not only does this creative and cost-effective series provide interesting snapshots of life around the world and inspiration for those looking to travel post-COVID, My Town ensures that international alumni are represented in the stories we tell and communicates to all our readers that they are part of a vibrant, global alumni community.

So far, we’ve featured eight alumni living in cities in Kenya, United Arab Emirates, the United States, Peru, Indonesia, and Portugal. We took a multi-channel approach in telling their stories — publishing them on the UBC Magazine website, sharing them in our e-newsletters and on various social channels, and adapting them into micro-stories for Instagram. We also hoped our alumni participants, selected in part because of their influence on Instagram, would love the end result enough to share it with their networks.

In 2022, the stories collectively reached over 70,000 unique individuals, garnered a half million social impressions, and generated 3,600+ social engagements (with numbers continuing to rise in 2023). To our delight, participants did share their stories on their Instagram accounts, which range in size from 1000+ followers to 2.4 million!