From the Judges' Report

• "Ideas that Move the World Forward," is the entry that every school could achieve, if they employed the long-range planning, consistent execution, and careful recalibration of content employed by Duke University.
• The University worked with campus partners to recruit remarkable faculty and alumni to give TED-style talks at events held around the country supporting their comprehensive fundraising campaign. Each talk was recorded and then edited to a 15-minute version, and later a less than 3-minute version. The Duke University Marketing & Communications team then deployed this content through their website, emails and the social media using promoted posts and the hashtag #WisdomWednesday.
• What makes this campaign stand apart for our judging panel was how Duke consistently looked at its results and made changes to their strategy based on how content had performed. While initial videos were 15-minutes long (following the original TED Talk model), Duke's analysis of the length of time each video was viewed soon led them to produce an additional shorter version which was close-captioned for social media. They also looked for intersections between the video content they had and real-world events, like promoting a Coach David Cutcliffe segment just before a home football game.
• These efforts paid off with 53 weeks of content garnering more than 3.5 million social media impressions.
• Judges called the entry "modern traditional" because Duke took a risk by investing time and resources into sharing content on this grand scale but adhered to the formal standards of higher education that appeal to high-level donors. And, they were impressed that Duke University achieved this all with very little budget expenditure. That's part of why this entry would be so easily duplicated by other schools - and is rated as our "best practice" that should become common practice in the years to come.