From the Nominator

Honor the Future: The Campaign for the University of Virginia publicly launched in October of 2019. Prior to launch, UVA’s Advancement Communications team developed the Honor the Future campaign identity system. The work draws upon UVA’s distinctive historic imagery and architecture by integrating contemporary yet elegant elements, producing a campaign identity rooted in the university’s founding ideals, but one that fully embraces its future. After the visual identity was approved by senior leadership, Advancement Communications worked to encourage consistent adoption among development communicators, despite the university’s largely decentralized fundraising system. Our goal was to deploy a system that was appealing and cost-effective to follow, and that made it easy for our cross-grounds colleagues to create beautiful campaign materials for their individual schools and units. We met regularly with designers across the university, and with frequently-used vendors to present new work, answer questions, and workshop specific pieces. Finally, we worked with central advancement stakeholders to expand the identity system to target specific audiences, such as major donors and annual giving audiences. The result of our efforts has been wide-spread adoption of our identity system and a collaborative campaign launch that created an immersive, branded experience over more than a dozen weekend events. The adoption and use of the brand continues as we enter into the sustain phase of the campaign, which is scheduled to end in June of 2025.

From the Judges

We were impressed by the Honor the Future campaign, a comprehensive and all-encompassing branding exercise that connects and compliments the university brand. Success of this campaign can be seen through the wide-spread adoption of the visual identity, and the philanthropic gifts received.