Best of CASE District IV Award
 

Institution: The University of Texas At Austin

Title of entry: New Climate Degree

About this entry: The Jackson School of Geosciences community—faculty members, researchers, alumni, and current students—are a philosophically diverse bunch. Because theirs fields span everything from economic geology to environmental science, Jackson School community members can hold diverging views on topics such as climate change.
As we helped the school announce its new Climate System Science undergraduate major, we had three important audiences to keep in mind, and slightly different messages for each. 1) For alumni and donors currently working in the energy sector, this new degree needed to be framed as a widening of the geosciences rather than a pivot away from what would be considered a more “traditional” curriculum. 2) For the larger environmental science community, we wanted to show that the Jackson School embraces climate science. And 3) For students and their parents, we needed to prove that there are jobs for climate scientists after graduation.
Rather than a package designed to drive enrollment, this communications strategy needed to build awareness of this new major in a welcoming, all-inclusive, non-divisive manner.
To achieve this, we wrote a story about the new degree that went both on our website and in two of our print magazines, rolled out a social media plan, created a new webpage for the degree, and invited local and on-campus media to cover the story.
The story ended up on the front page of The Daily Texan, UT’s student newspaper, was covered several times by Austin station KXAN, and was carried by Yahoo News and several other outlets.