Best of CASE District III Award
 

Institution: University of Georgia

Title of entry: Georgia Game Changers

About this entry: In Summer 2023, we sat down to brainstorm new and creative ways to leverage the hype and excitement of the upcoming Georgia Football season, fresh off our second National Championship, and tell a collection of student stories, helping to remind our audiences that there’s more to UGA than just what happens “between the hedges” on a game day Saturday. We landed on Georgia Game Changers, a collection of student profiles about students who support the Georgia Football ecosystem in a number of ways, including a few student-athletes from the team. With input from around campus, we settled on 12 students and proceeded to develop the look and feel of the Georgia Game Changers website and photography. Through a combination of writers, photographers, creative designers, web developers and social media professionals, the site and campaign went live in September. Each student was given a dedicated photo shoot and story, as well as an Instagram Reel and other social media posts. Members of the social media attended nearly every shoot because we planned from an early stage to use behind-the-scenes footage of the shoots, in combination with the polished photos, to help tell these students’ stories. The campaign was a resounding success. We published a total of 120 pieces of content on social media throughout the fall season dedicated to Game Changers, which resulted in 4,237,232 impressions and 246,819 engagements (a 5.8% engagement rate). In total, the Game Changers site received 31,990 pageviews from September 13 to December 31, 2023.