Welcome to the Inaugural STUies Award ceremony. I'm Katy.
And I'm Monique. And we're excited to have you here with us today.
I'd first like to take a moment to thank you all for joining us this week for the digital impact summit. We hope that you have enjoyed the sessions and have gained further insight on your digital recruitment strategies.
As we conclude this week sessions, we're extremely excited to recognize some of our outstanding partners. Today we'll be featuring our partners excellence in the following categories. Most Creative Promotion, Best Integrated experience, Rookie of the Year and Partner of the Year.
We would like to start this ceremony off with our first award, Most Creative Promotion. The Most Creative Promotion award goes to a partner who shows excellence in their creative and strategic use of site promotion. They use a consistent mix of content, channels and innovation. They follow best practices to a tee, and are always willing to test different methods of promotion. Our four nominees for this award are Wayne State College, Transylvania University, Fort Lewis College, and Suffolk University. I'm excited to announce that the 2021's STUie's Most Creative Promotion award goes to Transylvania University.
Thank you so much to Student Bridge for recognizing the work that we're doing here at Transylvania University. Since 1780, we're right here in the heart of downtown Lexington, Kentucky with a 16th oldest university in the country. But that doesn't mean that we're not looking for ways to connect with today's students. And that's what we've done with Student Bridge. We've started partnering with Student Bridge in 2019. And we've launched our site in February of 2020. Well, we all know what happened in March of 2020. And that was a global pandemic. But we were in a position because of the work that we had done, to be ready to meet our students where they were, and they were online. So our video tour, our interactive student map, we're right there ready to welcome students to our campus. In June of 2020, we partnered again with Student Bridge on VISITour and created an interactive tour of our campus, narrated by some of our student ambassadors, it's been a great opportunity for us to reach out not only to students in our community, who weren't able to get to campus for tours, but students beyond Central Kentucky and even the South. One of the things that we like most about working with Student Bridge is that even though some of us on our team, myself included, have backgrounds in video production. It's not what we do every day. The creative team that came to campus interviewed our students, shot the B roll, did a fantastic job of not only capturing what our students had to say, but really what it's like to be here at Transylvania university as a student, and they did so much more quickly, effectively and professionally than we would have been able to do in house. Again, thank you so much to Student Bridge. We're so excited to receive this award, and we can't wait to continue working with you in the future.
Our next award is Best Integrated Experience. The Best Integrated Experience award goes to our partner that embraces Student Bridge's vision from start to finish. They've built their suite of solutions on the importance that digital impact has on enrollment. The nominees are Grand Valley State University, St. Joseph's University, my alma mater, Boston University, and the University of New Haven. And the winner of Best Integrated Experience goes to St. Joseph's University. Congratulations.
I'm [INAUDIBLE].
I'm Robbie Castella.
And we're accepting the award on behalf of everyone at St. Joseph's.
It's been a real pleasure to work with everybody in Student Bridge, and we're really excited for the nomination, and for accepting the Award for Best Integrated Experience. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
That was awesome!
Our third award is Rookie of the Year. This award is for our newer partners, those who have joined the Student Bridge family, more recently. They've embraced the process from start to finish. This institution has gone above and beyond with content creation, strategy and promotion, which has led to exceptional success in their first six months of use. Our nominees for Rookie of the Year were Ilan University, Muskingum University, Miami University, and Kane University. I'm excited to announce the winner of the 2021 STUie's Rookie of the Year award is Ilan University. Unfortunately, Ilan was not able to send in an acceptance speech so I will be accepting this award on their behalf. We are so proud of everything that Ilan has done so far with Student Bridge, and they are so well deserving of this Rookie of the Year award. Congratulations Ilan.
Finally, we have our most awaited award, the Inaugural Partner of the Year award. This award goes to a partner who's fully embraced the Student Bridge mission. They not only adopt the Student Bridge vision and best practices, but they are eager to participate in events, vision partner meetings, and webinars. They take full advantage of opportunities and are willing to explore new ideas and concepts in partnerships with our team. Our four nominees are Southwestern Law school, Kennesaw State University Graduate School, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Georgia Southern University. And our winner is Fairleigh Dickinson University! Congrats.
I got some amazing news the other day, Student Bridge is recognizing Fairleigh Dickinson University as Partner of the Year. Unbelievable. Hi, I'm Luke Schultheis, the Vice President of enrollment at Fairleigh Dickinson University. And we're just thrilled to be recognized with that accolade. But in fact, we should be giving you the award. It all started like this. About a year and a half ago, we suddenly had to get everyone home and do everything remotely. And we were like, gee whiz, what are we going to do to get our admitted students for the fall acclimated to the campus to help them meet their professors and things like that in the summer? So I gave Jonathan Clues a call, and he put Student Bridge to work, and you gave us a virtual Admitted Student Experience, an amazing platform by which the students could integrate with the families and the faculty and the staff remotely, it worked beautifully. And then we said, well, we've still got to be recruiting for the next cycle. But we can't go to open houses or have people come onto campus or do things like that. So you develop both undergraduate and graduate information platforms for us for different events and videos and all sorts of engaging activities. And we said, oh, no, we can't let people on the campus. It's a full lockdown. And we can't even let our own faculty and staff on the campus. What do we do? You developed for us a dynamic campus map. That was just fantastic. And really, it let people see the inside and outside of buildings, use some of our stock photography and videos, you got new stuff up. It was amazing. Our current students, the ones who were enrolled during the pandemic, and there were a lot remote, and there were some on campus, but Student Activities was at a standstill. We needed bad help, really big time. And you develop for us the bubble product. Suddenly, we had within three weeks over 1000 students engaged with each other in activities and meetings and clubs and things of that nature, such a retention helper. And then finally, we said, well, the world has been test optional for a year, students haven't been able to access one of those traditional places where we buy names, how are we going to generate leads, and you've come up with a brilliant solution for us for lead gen as well. Student Bridge we really thank you for all that you've done for us. We thank you for the recognition as well. I'm going to drink a little-- Pop a little bottle of champagne here from the local vineyard.
Thank you all so much for your participation this week, and for your partnership with Student Bridge. We are thrilled for each and every institution who was nominated today. And we are grateful for each and every team member who has taken part in the events this week. Cheers to our winners. We look forward to continued success with all of our partners.
