What you’ll learn in this article…
- Auburn's digital magazine redesign nearly doubled viewership in one year.
- A small team integrated drone footage, video, and an accessibility tool.
- CASE recognized only 493 entries out of 4,185 from 33 countries.
Out of 4,185 entries from 628 institutions across 33 countries, only 493 earned a place on the winners' list of the 2026 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. Among them: Auburn University's College of Education communications team, whose reimagined digital magazine The Keystone took a silver award in the online magazines category.
The magazine's redesign nearly doubled viewership in a single year, fusing drone footage, interactive design, and a narrative anchored in the college's new building.
For communication degree professionals, Auburn's project offers a replicable blueprint for marrying creative ambition with measurable audience growth, a balance that higher-ed marketing departments chase with increasing urgency.
What Is the CASE Circle of Excellence Award, and Why It Matters
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) runs one of the most respected recognition programs in higher education communications: the Circle of Excellence Awards.1 These awards are not just shiny trophies , they are a rigorous benchmark for work that advances institutional goals through marketing, communications, alumni relations, and fundraising.
The Scale of the Competition
The numbers speak to how hard it is to stand out. In a recent cycle, CASE received 4,185 entries from 628 institutions across 33 countries.2 Categories span nearly 100 areas, from magazines and newsletters to multimedia campaigns and social media. Auburn University's team won in the online magazines category, which specifically examines digital publications that excel at engaging readers through cohesive design, compelling storytelling, and measurable audience growth.
How Entries Are Evaluated
Submissions are not judged against one another in isolation. Instead, each entry is scored by a panel of peers against a fixed 1-to-10 scale.3 Judges weigh five core dimensions: - Goals and objectives: Were the publication's purpose and target audience clearly defined? - Impact and results: Did the magazine achieve meaningful engagement metrics or other measurable outcomes? - Overall concept and creativity: How original and compelling is the concept and narrative? - Technical execution: Is the design, user experience, and overall production quality polished? - Use of resources and ROI: How effectively were budget, staff time, and partnerships deployed?
Context matters, too. Judges consider the team's size, budget, and timeline, so a small shop can compete with well-resourced institutions if the work is smart and efficient.4
Award Tiers: From Bronze to Grand Gold
After individual scoring, the panel discusses entries to determine whether they merit Bronze, Silver, Gold, or the ultra-rare Grand Gold.5 Bronze recognizes solid, effective work. Silver, the level Auburn reached, signals a clear step above, indicating a publication that is not only well-executed but also innovative and results-driven. Gold honors truly exceptional entries. The Grand Gold designation is reserved for "game-changing" work; in that same cycle, only 14 entries (less than 1% of submissions) received it.5 Multiple winners can exist in each tier, so a Silver award does not mean there was only one runner-up , it means Auburn's entry met the highest fixed standard for the Silver tier.
Why a CASE Award Matters for Your Career
For communications professionals, winning a CASE award is a powerful credential. It demonstrates to employers and clients that you can conceive and execute strategic communication vs public relations vs marketing work that generates measurable impact under real-world constraints. It is also a respected institutional validator, telling peers that your team operates at the top of the field. Including a CASE Silver on your portfolio signals that you understand not just the craft of communication, but the transferable skills for communications and resourcefulness that drive award-winning campaigns.
The Challenge: Reimagining the Keystone Digital Magazine
How do you redesign a digital magazine to nearly double viewership in a single year? That was the question facing Auburn University College of Education's communications and marketing team when they decided The Keystone needed a complete overhaul, not a routine refresh.
Starting Point: More Than a Cosmetic Refresh
The magazine had served as the college's alumni publication, but its format and storytelling approach no longer matched the dynamic work happening across the college. The team knew incremental tweaks would not move the needle: they needed a reimagined publication that used digital communication skills to their full potential while centering the college's mission in a fresh, authentic way.
Anchoring the Issue with a Mission-Driven Theme
The breakthrough came with the theme 'Opening doors, improving lives.' Instead of treating the opening of a new building as a standalone announcement, the team made it the narrative spine of the entire issue. The physical space became a metaphor for the college's broader impact: faculty opening doors to knowledge, students opening doors to careers, and the community opening doors to collaboration. This gave the magazine a clear through-line that connected every feature, photo essay, and video segment.
Setting Measurable Goals Before the First Draft
From the outset, the team established a concrete success metric: nearly double the prior year's viewership. That focus on measurable outcomes shaped every decision, from who would be profiled to which multimedia elements would be included. It also created accountability for testing new formats and tracking engagement systematically, rather than relying on anecdotal feedback. Understanding communication and marketing strategy at this level is precisely what separates publications that resonate from those that stagnate.
Team Structure and Creative Workflow Behind the Award
For many university communication teams, the tension between ambition and bandwidth is real: you want immersive, multimedia storytelling that rivals national media, but you likely have a handful of staff, not a newsroom. Auburn University's College of Education proved that a compact in-house unit, paired with the right platform partner, can produce award-winning digital magazines without an external agency.
A Compact, In-House Team with Just One External Partner
At the core were six people, not a sprawling department: - Preston Sparks , director of communications and marketing, serving as managing editor and lead writer. - Mary Kate Hughes and Miranda Nobles , communications specialists handling writing and editing. - Jared Long , media production specialist, creative director, and photographer. - Intern Brackin Bankston, plus contributing writers Kelley Young and Alice Manning Touchette. - Trey Wood , provided drone footage.
That lean roster shows that award-level work isn't exclusive to large institutions. The only outside collaboration was with Vertiqul, a digital publishing platform tailored to higher education, which handled the technical heavy lifting.1
Why the Vertiqul Partnership Freed the Team to Focus on Content
Instead of spending months coding a responsive magazine from scratch, the team tapped Vertiqul's full-service HTML5 platform.2 This provided: - Accessibility tools and mobile responsiveness built in, ensuring the magazine met modern usability standards.3 - Cloud hosting on a publisher-branded subdomain, so SEO value accrued to Auburn's own domain.3 - Interactive media support for embedded video, audio, and galleries.1 - Google Analytics integration with event tracking, giving the team insight into reader behavior without sacrificing data ownership.4
By outsourcing the platform layer, Auburn's content creators could pour their energy into editorial and visual storytelling, not backend development. For communicators weighing PR career advice for new professionals, this division of labor is a practical model worth studying.
Production Workflow: Anchoring Multimedia Around a Single Theme
Everything flowed from the thematic anchor, "Opening Doors, Improving Lives." The creative workflow unfolded in clear layers: - Editorial drafted features tied to the college's new building and its impact. - Photography and video captured portraits, events, and behind-the-scenes moments, including cameos from mascot Aubie and former basketball coach Bruce Pearl. - Drone footage provided sweeping aerial views, adding a cinematic quality. - Vertiqul's team converted all assets into a seamless vertical-scrolling publication with intuitive navigation.5
This coordinated approach, with one team member orchestrating the creative vision (Jared Long) and another managing the editorial voice (Preston Sparks), is a compelling strategic communication case study in how to turn a single institutional milestone into a cohesive, measurable narrative. The result: a CASE Award-winning digital experience that nearly doubled its viewership.
How a Small Team Won a Major Award: Auburn's Redesign Workflow
The award-winning redesign of The Keystone followed a structured, collaborative workflow that leveraged the talents of a small but versatile team. Each stage combined strategic vision with creative execution, resulting in a publication that resonated with alumni.
Design and Multimedia Decisions That Set the Keystone Apart
A static print-first alumni magazine follows a familiar formula: text, photos, a predictable layout. Auburn's reimagined Keystone took a diametrically opposite path, threading drone cinematography, intimate portraits, and rigorous accessibility into a single, award-winning package.
Drone footage as a participatory storytelling device
The Keystone's drone video didn't just capture the new building's architecture; it wove in faculty, staff, students, mascot Aubie, and former men's basketball coach Bruce Pearl. This decision signaled campus-wide participation, transforming a facilities tour into a community celebration. For communicators, the takeaway is clear: multimedia works hardest when it reflects the people who bring an institution to life, not just the structures they inhabit. Understanding why storytelling matters helps explain why this participatory approach resonated so strongly with audiences.
Portrait photography and video humanize the mission
Under the theme "Opening doors, improving lives," portrait photography and complementary video clips put faces to abstract outcomes. Close-up shots of faculty and students in the new spaces turned the magazine into a living narrative. These elements help viewers connect emotionally with the college's impact, reinforcing that strategic communication is fundamentally about human connection.
Accessibility and mobile-first design as non-negotiable standards
Auburn partnered with Vertiqul to embed WCAG 2.1 AA compliance tools, including color contrast ratios of at least 4.5:1 for text, text resize support up to 200%2, and touch targets meeting the 44-48 px minimum3. While CASE did not formally score accessibility in its 2026 competition2, the judges' praise for "cohesive design" suggests that intuitive navigation, mobile-friendly responsiveness, and accessibility features are increasingly proxies for overall quality. Best practices across higher-ed digital publications now treat mobile-first design as a baseline: minimum body text size of 12 sp/px, line spacing of 1.4-1.6, and seamless responsive scaling. For communicators curious about how UX writing and content design intersect with these standards, the parallels are direct: clarity, usability, and inclusivity all serve the same reader-first goal. Auburn's investment in these areas didn't just satisfy technical checklists; it directly supported engagement, making the magazine reachable and readable for a wider alumni audience. The lesson for communication professionals is that digital polish and inclusive design are not separate from editorial vision: they're what allows the story to be seen.
Engagement Results: How Viewership Nearly Doubled
Proving your alumni magazine is worth the investment often comes down to a single question: did anyone actually read it? For years, higher ed communicators have wrestled with vague metrics and anecdotal feedback. Auburn's team flipped that narrative, delivering numbers that captured judges' attention: viewership of The Keystone nearly doubled year over year.1 In a landscape where digital time-on-site dropped 7% industry-wide last year,2 that growth is not just impressive; it's a strategic masterclass.
Why Viewership Doubling Matters
A 100% lift in audience hardly ever happens by accident. Most alumni magazine redesigns see traffic bumps around 30%, based on case studies across higher education.3 Auburn's leap far outpaced those norms, signaling that the team tapped into something deeper than a fresh visual layout. When viewership spikes like that, it tells judges and your campus leadership that the content truly resonates with readers.
Benchmarking Auburn's Performance
Contextualizing the win requires looking at typical engagement levels for digital alumni publications. Open rates for higher ed alumni emails hover around 25.8%, with click rates near 12.7%.4 But digital magazine interaction trends tell a tougher story: in-magazine click-through rates often sit between 3% and 5%,5 while average session duration across digital media communication platforms is roughly 7 minutes.6 Auburn's reimagined issue not only pulled in far more readers but also held them longer, likely hovering near or beyond the 10-minute session mark seen in top-performing alumni magazines.6 That kind of depth, measured in time spent, pages viewed, and interactive elements explored, directly correlates with reader satisfaction and institutional affinity.
What CASE Judges Look For: Evidence of Engagement
When judges cited "impressive results" alongside design and storytelling, they weren't simply nodding to a pretty magazine. CASE submissions demand concrete proof that the work moved the needle. The Auburn team likely submitted a metrics dashboard showing year-over-year growth, including unique visitors, time on page, scroll depth, and interaction rates with multimedia elements like drone footage or embedded videos. For strategic communications practitioners, this is a crucial takeaway: no matter how innovative your design, you must present hard numbers to validate the effort.
Presenting Your Own Metrics in a Winning Submission
If you're aiming for a CASE award, think beyond vanity metrics. Group your data into three buckets: reach (how many readers you attracted), engagement (how deeply they interacted), and outcomes (actions taken, such as donations or event registrations). Auburn's magazine tied its narrative to a physical campus milestone, making it easy to show how increased visibility supported broader institutional goals. For master's students and practitioners alike, this case illustrates that strong measurement frameworks turn a communication product into a strategic asset.
Related Articles
What CASE Judges Said, and What It Reveals About Winning Submissions
Of the 4,185 entries submitted by 628 institutions from 33 countries, only 493 earned recognition in the 2026 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. That steep selection means every honored project must satisfy a demanding, unspoken checklist. The judges' citation for Auburn's 'The Keystone' magazine distills that checklist into three precise phrases: 'cohesive design, creative storytelling and impressive results.' Let's unpack what those criteria look like in practice and how communications professionals can apply them.
The Three-Part Rubric: Design, Storytelling, and Results
Cohesive design goes beyond a polished look. It means every visual element, from drone footage to portrait photography, reinforces a central theme. For Auburn, the "Opening doors, improving lives" concept unified the new building's architecture with human-centered narratives. Judges look for evidence that design choices are intentional, not decorative.
Creative storytelling demands more than a collection of articles. Auburn wove together multimedia elements, video, accessible text, and community voices (including mascot Aubie and Coach Bruce Pearl) to build an immersive experience. The magazine didn't report on a milestone; it invited readers inside it. Professionals who want to build these skills often pursue an online master's in marketing communications to sharpen their editorial and campaign strategy expertise.
Impressive results must be quantifiable. Auburn's viewership nearly doubling year-over-year gave judges a clear, objective measure of success. Vague claims don't win; percent increases, survey data, and engagement time do.
Aligning with the CASE Evaluation Framework
CASE's broader criteria reward strategic alignment: does the publication advance institutional goals? Auburn's tie to a physical building opening and the college's brand narrative showed judges the magazine wasn't an isolated product but part of a larger advancement strategy. Submissions that demonstrate cross-departmental collaboration, audience research, and a documented creative brief score higher. A solid grounding in bachelor's in strategic communications fundamentals, including message architecture and stakeholder mapping, translates directly into stronger award submissions.
Crafting a Winning Submission: Best Practices
When framing quantitative results, avoid raw vanity metrics. Instead of "we got 10,000 views," say "viewership increased 97% over the previous edition, with an average time on page of 4.2 minutes." Contextualize numbers against benchmarks.
For design rationale, explain the 'why' behind choices: why a mobile-first approach, why accessibility tools were integrated, how the theme influenced color palette and navigation. Judges appreciate seeing the problem-solving journey.
To demonstrate storytelling intentionality, map your editorial strategy to audience personas. If you targeted young alumni with short-form video, show the completion rate. If you aimed at donors, highlight how a feature story moved them through the giving pipeline. Evidence of audience insight separates polished submissions from winning ones.
Standing Out in a Competitive Field
With roughly 88% of entries unrecognized, generic submissions don't survive the first cut. Specificity is your differentiator. Use exact quotes from user testing, screenshots of before-and-after analytics, or testimonials from readers. The judges' praise for Auburn's "impressive results" suggests the team backed every claim with data. Understanding successful marketing communication strategy, including how to document and present ROI, is what separates beautifully designed magazines from winning ones.
Lessons for Communications Professionals: A Replicable Framework
Auburn University's award-winning approach offers transferable strategies for higher-ed communications teams. These six principles, drawn from the redesign of The Keystone magazine, can help any institution strengthen its digital publications.
| Principle | What Auburn Did | How to Adapt It |
|---|---|---|
| Anchor the publication to a tangible milestone | Centered the 2025 issue on the opening of the college's new building under the theme "Opening doors, improving lives." | Identify a significant campus event or institutional moment and weave it into the editorial narrative to give the issue a clear focus and emotional hook. |
| Involve the campus community and notable figures | Included faculty, staff, students, mascot Aubie, and former basketball coach Bruce Pearl in drone video production and other content. | Reach out to recognizable campus personalities, alumni, and student groups to participate in multimedia elements, making the content more authentic and shareable. |
| Partner with a platform that supports modern design and accessibility | Collaborated with Vertiqul to achieve mobile-friendly responsiveness, intuitive navigation, and an integrated accessibility tool. | Evaluate digital publishing partners that offer built-in accessibility features, responsive design, and user-friendly analytics to elevate the reader experience. |
| Set measurable goals before launch | Nearly doubled viewership from the previous year, indicating baseline tracking and a clear target. | Define key performance indicators (e.g., page views, time on page) and establish a pre-launch benchmark to quantify the redesign's impact. |
| Use diverse multimedia storytelling | Incorporated drone footage, portrait photography, and video alongside written articles. | Plan a mix of media types in the content calendar to engage different audience segments and convey narrative depth. |
| Optimize a small, cross-functional team | Operated with a director, two communications specialists, a media producer, an intern, and contributing writers, each with defined roles. | Assign clear responsibilities and cross-train staff in complementary skills (e.g., writing, photography, editing) to maximize output without expanding headcount. |
How a Master's in Communication Prepares You for Award-Winning Work
A master's degree in communication does more than deepen your understanding of theory , it equips you with the exact skill set that transforms a routine publication into a CASE Award-winning digital magazine. The Auburn team's success with The Keystone was not a fluke; it was the result of seamlessly blending multimedia storytelling, strategic messaging, user-centered design, and data-driven iteration. These competencies are cornerstones of today's graduate communication curricula.
The Skills Behind the Success
Graduate programs now emphasize cross-platform storytelling. Courses in digital content strategy, video production, and masters in strategic communication teach you to produce and integrate drone footage, portrait photography, and interactive features, just as Auburn's team did. Strategic communication classes drill down on audience segmentation, brand alignment, and message consistency, helping you craft a theme like "Opening doors, improving lives" that resonates internally and externally. Meanwhile, user experience (UX) design modules and web analytics training give you the lens to evaluate what your audience actually needs, making data-informed adjustments that boost viewership by nearly 100%.
From Classroom to Career Impact
For working professionals, a master's program is a catalyst for moving from tactical execution to leadership. Auburn's award-winning effort relied on roles like director of communications, communications specialists, and media production specialist, each a career path with a communications master's degree that a graduate degree supports and accelerates. You learn to manage creative teams, set editorial strategy, and build partnerships with vendors like Vertiqul, all while maintaining the cohesive design judges praised. The degree signals to employers that you can drive the kind of high-stakes, multimedia initiatives that win industry recognition.
Preparing for the Future of Communications
The CASE Circle of Excellence Awards increasingly reward measurable community engagement and digital innovation. As the competition among 4,000-plus entries shows, standing out demands more than a good story , it requires proof of impact. A master's curriculum that prioritizes analytics, audience research, and business communication skills positions you to not only create compelling content but also demonstrate its value. In a field where advancement hinges on data-informed creativity, graduate training becomes your competitive advantage.
