A successful night at the Heist Awards

Two University campaigns focused on our community have won the Heist Award, which recognise excellence and innovation in education marketing.

The Heist Awards have been running for 30 years and is hosted by Havas Education – part of one of the world’s largest communications networks Havas Group.

The campaigns that won the Bronze Award this year are:

• UoRWay (Best Brand/Reputation Campaign): UoRWay shared inspirational stories from our students and our colleagues on how our University continued to thrive during the pandemic. The judges congratulated the University on “a clear message that would have had a positive impact on individual students as well as the wider university community.”

• Be a Mate (Best Student Engagement Campaign or Initiative): Be a Mate raised alcohol awareness amongst students, helping them to make informed choices about alcohol whilst supporting their friends. The judges commended it as “a truly innovative and unique campaign that stood out in its category.”

We were also highly commended for “the impact of data and insight” in the Best use of data and insight category; in the judges’ words “this was a low budget initiative developed from desk-based research that highlighted a good route forward and shaped a broad-thinking campaign.”

The University was also nominated in the following two categories:

• Best Open Day Experience: Virtual Open Days
• Best PR/Communications Campaign or Initiative: Demonstrating Research Strengths through a Pandemic

Fi Blair, Director of MCE said, “This is a tremendous outcome for MCE; to achieve five shortlisted submissions and win three awards in what has been the most challenging of years is an awesome achievement!”