Best of CASE District VI Award
 

Institution: Iowa State University

Title of entry: 12 outstanding seniors, ready to make their mark

About this entry: This set of Outstanding Seniors features is an example of high-value, multi-use content that honors students’ successes and tells the Cyclone Engineering story in their own words.
Every semester, college leadership selects one senior from each major to be honored at graduation. We thoughtfully selected questions that yielded wonderful answers from seniors. Those answers, paired with high-quality visuals, offer a trove of content that illustrates positive aspects of the student experience and lends itself to evergreen use in support of our unit’s recruitment and reputation goals.
Three core content pieces drove this initiative: the professional portrait of each student; an announcement web article/landing page listing all honorees and highlighting a quote from each; and an individual web article for each student’s questionnaire in full.
From those, we produced a still-growing list of high-impact uses including: a social media plan honoring the students as a cohort and individually; newsletters sent to faculty/staff and alumni honoring the students as well as an ongoing “mentorship spotlight” series in our faculty/staff newsletter; print products for internal and external audiences; direct sharing to those mentioned as mentors, the Office of the President, Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost, Engineering Career Services, the Iowa State University Foundation. We continue to pull from this content for uses such as ceremony remarks.
This collection of deliverables all work together to promote the excellence of the Cyclone Engineering experience to prospective and current students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni, representatives, and more.