Best of CASE District I Award
 

Institution: University of Connecticut Foundation, Inc

Title of entry: UConn Magazine Five Covers Summer 2023

About this entry: What do you do when weeks from your ship date your men’s basketball team wins their fifth national championship in 25 years? You need to make the most of a major moment. But you can’t plan ahead for something like that — obviously you would jinx it. Our tiny UConn Magazine team of a dedicated editor/publisher and art director and part-time photographer and associate editor seized the moment. With days to spare we scrapped our issue’s anchor feature and speedily created a brand new one from scratch, one worthy of the moment and including an essay by legendary NCAA commentator Jim Nantz. We did the same with our intended cover. And then we created four more covers. Five covers for five championships. A big response to a big moment.
A nearly department-wide brainstorm, resourcefulness to do a lot with a little bit of extra funding (creating two covers internally, finding the right freelance illustrators, doing whatever we could in-house to facilitate the externally created covers), and a lot of passion and resilience made them all happen in the way we envisioned despite many hurdles. We randomly distributed all five to our 235,000 subscribers. The huge positive response from our audience (and UConn Nation and fans at large) made it clear this was a slam dunk.