Award: Silver

Institution: University of California, Davis

Title of Entry: The UC Davis University Honors Program Case for Support

About this Entry: This case statement for the UC Davis University Honors Program, “Advancing Equity and Excellence in a Complex World,” energetically introduces our university’s premier honors program to a donor and public audience through inspiring prose, brightly colored and highly visual design, and candid quotes from students, alumni and professors. Together, these elements convey the program’s unique culture of collaborative excellence, strengths in promoting diversity and inclusion, and compelling need for student scholarship support.

In addition to providing an overview of the program and a description of philanthropic priorities to share with donors, this case statement played an important role in advancing internal conversations about how the UHP expresses its mission and key talking points. Creating the document involved an unusually high degree of collaboration with faculty and administrators, development officers and the designer to refine messaging, tone and imagery into a final product that all felt captured the essence of the program and the potential impact of private support. Developing the content also involved multiple interviews with current and former students and careful stewardship of their relationships with UC Davis. The interviews gathered fresh perspectives on the core aspects of the program from those closest to it. Quotes from these conversations help bring the case for support to life while bolstering key messages presented in large-format text.