Best of CASE District III Award
 

Institution: Virginia Commonwealth University

Title of entry: VCU Magazine

About this entry: Before 2023, Virginia Commonwealth University (created in 1968 from the shuttering of Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia) produced three university-level publications: Shafer Court Connections, mailed to graduates of the undergraduate campus; Scarab, mailed to some graduates of the health sciences schools; and Impact, mailed to donors during VCU’s previous philanthropic campaign.

Though acknowledging the university’s history and diverse audiences, these publications were without dedicated staff and prevented VCU from having a flagship magazine. Articles were written by contributing staff or freelancers and many were biography-heavy profiles. Scarab and Shafer Court Connections had significant (and toward the end total) editorial overlap and the three magazines, which also had readership overlap, reached about 85,000 households (out of 230,000-plus donor and alumni households).

From 2018 to 2022, VCU embarked on a reimagining of its magazines, hiring a consultant and interviewing internal stakeholders and readers. Key themes emerged: VCU — a large, public, urban research university — needed a university magazine. It needed to mail it to more people. It needed dedicated staff. And it needed a defined editorial philosophy.

To achieve this, the Office of Development and Alumni Relations ended production of Shafer Court, Scarab and Impact, consolidated their budgets into a single budget and hired two full-time editors. Today, under their guidance and with a distribution of 100,000, VCU Magazine is a twice-a-year, 68-page general interest magazine that takes a journalistic approach to tell lively, well-reported, stylishly written and designed stories about the university community.