From the Nominator

"The KAUST Alumni Change Makers Awards digital campaign, a collaboration between the university’s central communications team and Alumni Affairs, aimed at strengthening connections between KAUST and its alumni. The inaugural year of this initiative was designed to honor and celebrate KAUST alumni making significant impacts in Saudi Arabia and internationally. 

To truly capture the attention of our target audience, we created a series of high-quality video interviews and written profile features telling the stories and the impacts of each of the three winning “Change Makers.” The production process was a triumph of both logistics and technical complexity, which was executed across multiple locations on three continents, and required seamless collaboration and engagement with numerous entities. 

At this point, the alumni community existed almost entirely on LinkedIn, so we prioritized it as our social media platform of choice. We posted a clear message inviting alumni to reconnect by participating in the "Change Makers" initiative. “Join us in congratulating Luisa,” an example of this approach, increased our engagement as expected and ignited spirited conversation on the platform. Some alumni reported their participation as their first engagement with KAUST since graduation. 

The KAUST Alumni website allowed us to integrate the beautiful with captivating written profile features to expand and explore elements that could not be captured in the two-minute video runtime. With this stunning content, we enticed alumni to not just reconnect with KAUST but to stay connected by subscribing to the alumni newsletter and attending upcoming reunions."

From the Judges

This entry showed a remarkable use of resources from KAUST, demonstrating strong international reach for a digital campaign and great diversity of subject matter. For such a small alumni body the results were also impressive, fueled by smart social integration and execution.