Best of CASE District I Award
 

Institution: Boston University

Title of entry: Bostonia, Boston University’s Alumni Magazine, Spring–Summer and Fall, 2022

About this entry: Bostonia, Boston University’s flagship alumni magazine, is produced three times a year. We strive to foster and sustain an emotional connection between alumni and the University—and to demonstrate BU’s enduring value to alums—by telling stories that reflect the intellectual life and vibrancy of the BU community. We write about our diverse and distinguished alumni, student life, the changing campus, and the many ways BU has become a global research powerhouse.

We chose to focus on BU research in our Spring-Summer 2022 issue, but we wanted to present those stories in a different way. We specifically chose stories that would instill wonder, awe, and optimism, and celebrate imagination, and we told them in a variety of ways—narrative, Q&A, visual. We hired a conceptual illustrator to provide the artwork and were also able to persuade BU alum and acclaimed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson to write an introduction; both hit it out of the park. The result: a colorful, attention-grabbing, thoroughly readable magazine we believe alums would feel proud to leave on their coffee tables and in their offices.

Our fall issue, in addition to including major University news (our president stepping down), star alums (the new director of Saturday Night Live, an alum-astronaut on the Space Station, a vet at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park), we tried a new alumni engagement feature. We asked alums to send us an original short poem on the subject of gratitude. We were stunned to receive 80 original poems. A huge hit.