From the Nominator

As part of the centennial celebration of University of the Pacific’s 1924 move from San Jose to Stockton, strategic communications developed an interactive timeline that highlights 78 historic moments from across Pacific’s three campuses in California. While the site takes its design cues and some of its content from a related story in the 2024 issue of Pacific Magazine, this interactive timeline far exceeds the scope and scale of the print and serves as a fully-fledged and standalone microsite in its own right by incorporating rich multimedia in the form of videos, audio recordings, and image carousels; a novel design that blends both vertical and horizontal scrolling; and a unique ability for Pacific’s alumni to virtually add themselves into the timeline directly. While the primary goal of this microsite was to invite the Pacific community to digitally involve themselves in Pacific’s centennial celebrations, we also recognized this site as having great strategic value to promote to key audience groups, including our alumni and influential members of the higher education community. To that end, we supported the distribution of this microsite with a modest digital marketing campaign on social media to these audiences. In the two months since the site launched in December and with only a few weeks of paid advertisements it has been viewed more than 6,000 times with an active user rate of 79.9%, had 226 alumni interactive adds to the timeline, been shared 110 times, and garnered dozens of alumni messages.

From the Judges

This entry was a highly inventive, fully in-house project that impressed us with its mobile optimization and interactive design. The timeline feature—especially the ability for alumni to add themselves—stood out as creative and deeply engaging. Strong participation confirmed its success. The site is clean, fun, and easy to navigate, with thoughtful design choices throughout. This is a standout example of interactive storytelling done right.