Best of CASE District VIII Award
 

Institution: University of Calgary

Title of entry: Dino Research Integrated Storytelling Success at UCalgary

About this entry: World-renowned paleontologist Dr. Darla Zelinitsky (Faculty of Science) and her partnership with the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta yields major discoveries every few years. Usually, most of the story gets told with external media with peripheral connection to the University of Calgary, but this time we wanted to build in more capacity to help tell the story on UCalgary channels with an integrated approach involving several communication channels, including traditional media and having Tyrrell as a partner.

The team worked closely with the researcher and her connections at the Royal Tyrrell Museum to create and pre-approve content that could be put into action as soon as the journal date was finally confirmed. We wanted an integrated communications plan across multiple channels (UCalgary News, external media, social media) and were very successful.
• Overall reach on UCalgary institutional social media: 131,611 with 41,501 video views and 2,839 additional engagements.
• Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology also posted more than 200,000+ in social media reach from this announcement.
• Google Analytics on UCalgary News article: 1,000 page views, quadruple baseline traffic to internal website article.
• Meltwater News data: 58 media mentions with 518 million potential reach, given the size of the outlets. Top mentions included the New York Times, Yahoo News and Gizmodo.
• Well-known musician Slash, a dinosaur-research enthusiast, saw the story and shared on social media (3.5M X followers and 4.2M Instagram followers)