CASE Announces 2012 Circle of Excellence Award Winners

Each year, I–like many others–look forward to seeing who wins awards in the CASE Circle of Excellence program. And CASE just announced the 2012 winners.

These awards are important not only because they identify and reward some of the best, most innovative work done by higher ed marketers, PR people, development staff, magazine editors, designers, and other professionals. But also because the awards are open to CASE members around the world, so competition is international in scope and it’s really hard to win.

I know how competitive these awards are because I’ve led the judging panels for websites since the 1990s and for social media for the last few years. For these judgings, 12–15 people, many of them Gold award winners, assemble to see what’s new and what sites (and social media campaigns) deserve an award.

It’s really hard for a website or a social initiative to pass muster with a bunch of opinionated curmudgeons such as the crew that assembled for this year’s judging. Mind you, I say that with the utmost affection. It’s supposed to be that way: if it wasn’t hard to win one of these awards, they wouldn’t matter, and the winners wouldn’t be an inspiration to others. So we want experienced, opinionated people who will weigh in and advocate for what they believe is good (and call out what they think sucks).

Jen Doak shared the winners of the website and social media awards on CASE’s social media blog this morning, with some general comments about each site. You can learn more about the judging process and (much more about what the judges liked–and didn’t like–about the winners) in the Judges’ Reports (for websites here and for social media here).

For the record, though, here are the winners in each category:

Websites (for the entire institution)

• Gold: University at Buffalo
• Silver: DePauw University
• Bronze: Boston University School of Engineering

Websites (for a department, program, or special purpose)

• Gold: American University’s WONK website [Note: WONKs won a lot of awards this year!]
• Silver: Columbia College, The Four Stages of Paying for College; Indiana University Cinema
• Bronze: Boston University’s You at BU; College of William & Mary Ampersandbox Admission Microsite; Harvard Kennedy School: Celebrating 75 Years; Princeton University: Alumni Association of Princeton University Website; Wofford College: The Republican Presidential Debate at Wofford

Social Media

Best Use of Social Media in Alumni Programming

• Gold: Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Fantasy Reunion; MIT-Cornell University, MIT-Cornell Fictional Alumni Face-Off
• Bronze: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame Week

Other Uses of Social Media

• Silver: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Flashmob on YouTube; Webster University, Summer Ticket Giveaway
• Bronze: McGill University, McGill Dances for Cancer Research

For details and links to various assets, see the Judges’ Reports.