Ron Hadfield's Archive

Abilene Christian University won eight awards, including three Grand Awards, in 2010 regional Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) competition. Awards were presented March 29 at CASE’s annual District IV conference in Austin, Texas.

University Marketing winners included Grand Awards in periodicals improvement (for “ACU Today magazine”), brochures/flyers/booklets (for “Introductory Viewbook”) and viewbooks (for “Academic Viewbook”); second place Excellence Awards in logo design (for “Study Abroad Logo”), publication design series (for “Live Up Campaign”) and color photography series (for “A Semester to Last a Lifetime” in ACU Today magazine’s Fall 2009 issue); a third place Achievement Award in viewbooks (for “Introductory Viewbook”); and a fourth-place Special Award in admissions, recruitment and promotional literature (for “Football Recruiting Guide).

CASE represents more than 3,000 institutions and 60,000 higher education professionals in alumni relations, communications, marketing, advancement services and development in 61 nations. District IV includes colleges, universities and schools of all sizes in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Mexico and Mexico.

ACU has won 97 regional awards and four international medals from CASE since 1985. Its winning Live Up and viewbook entries for 2010 were developed in concert with Stamats Communications and Corey Patterson, ACU’s director of enrollment marketing.

At the Austin conference, Ron Hadfield, assistant vice president for university communication, and Scott Kilmer, director of new media, presented a breakout session about ACU Today’s work to present its award-winning magazine to readers in multiple mediums, including print, Web and blog formats. Hadfield is editor of ACU Today, and Kilmer helped the magazine develop its Issuu.com site in 2009. Issuu hosts major Abilene Christian publications here.

University Marketing recently made six entries to 2010 Addy Award competition, sponsored by the Abilene chapter of the American Advertising Federation (AAF), and all six won in awards presented Feb. 25 at Fairway Oaks.  Four entries won Gold Addys: “LiveUp” in the Brochure/Campaigns category, “Intro Viewbook” in Brochures/color and “Academic Viewbook” in Brochures/Color, and “The Promise” (2009 President’s Circle film) in Elements of Advertising/Cinematography. The “2008-09 Mobile-Learning Report” won a Silver Addy in Annual Report/Color and “ACU Today” won a Bronze Addy in Magazine Design. In addition, “Intro Viewbook” was judged Best of Show.

Several of these awards are related to the “LiveUp” enrollment marketing campaign developed in conjunction with Stamats Communications. “LiveUp”-themed materials were rolled out in recruiting efforts this last year, helped ACU set an enrollment record in Fall 2009, and will influence our design of future marketing materials for the university.

Gold and silver Addy winners advance to AAF regional competition. ACU is no stranger to the Addy Awards, having won 260 of them since 1984, including 93 Gold Addys and five Best of Show honors.

While awards are not our motivation for doing effective and exemplary work for ACU, they do provide a source of pride and accomplishment for our team, as well as an acknowledgment from our professional peers of the quality of our work for you and ACU.

Two issues of ACU Today magazine can now be viewed on Issuu – including the first Bonus Coverage available only to online readers. The Summer 2009 issue is now joined by the Fall 2009 issue, which is a 76-pager, thanks to 24 pages of Bonus Coverage related to the cover story about the university’s Study Abroad program.

With its “page-turning technology,” Issuu provides a features-rich way to view what is essentially a 3D-looking PDF of the magazine. Each online issue is searchable and has live hot links to any URL appearing in the print edition. 

Issuu versions of the magazine should make a huge difference in our international alums’ ability to keep up with news of their alma mater. Otherwise, alums living abroad would expect to wait weeks or months for their issue of the magazine to arrive. 

We will soon be adding other back issues of ACU Today to Issuu, where other high-quality university publications can be found, such as the 2009 Mobile-Learning Report and the new-style Football Recruiting Guide (previously the Football Media Guide). 

We also are using WordPress to create a new blog for ACU Today.  The design complements the new design of the magazine, and will be soon supplemented with older content from the magazine’s original blog. Associate editor Katie Noah Gibson and I will be the primary authors, but I am hoping to add content from some of the magazine’s professional freelance writing staff, each of whom is an ACU alum. We are blessed with some great writers and I hope this can be a forum for some of them to contribute even more often.

We’ll be adding some additional features and widgets to the blog this week. Our aim is to make this a between-print-issues, regular stopping place for alums to learn more about ACU news and people than we might otherwise be able to share with them via other Web sites or in the 48 pages of the print version.

New way-finding signage has begun appearing on campus this fall to help visitors become more quickly familiar with ACU. Large purple signs now mark major entrances, and smaller purple signs help direct pedestrians to specific locations. University planners will continue to determine the location and information for both sizes of signs, and more will be installed as funds become available.

Colleges, departments and offices interested in helping accelerate the funding of way-finding signage for their visitors should contact Creative Services for more information.

A big “thank you” is due to Creative Services’ senior designer Greg Golden for developing these, and engineering them to be produced with the help of a local vendor, which saved the university thousands of dollars on each sign.

The exterior signage design also complements ACU’s interior signage program, which satisfies all requirements of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and presents a consistent look across campus for these important tools in helping inform visitors. There are four styles of ACU signs to designate interior rooms, each featuring Braille and molded letters/numbers raised from the sign surface. These customized interior signs must be ordered through Creative Services, where other samples also are available. Note that old-style “blade” signs above or near the top of doors are not ADA-compliant. Watch for more info about that to come.