The Durban University of Technology (DUT) scooped two awards, a gold and a bronze award at the annual Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Excellence Awards held online on Thursday, 29 July 2021.
The gold award was given to DUT for the DUT Cinema Advert in the Audio, Visual and Audio-Visual category. Meanwhile, DUT’s alumni publication, DUTConnect achieved the bronze award in the Printed: External Magazines and Newsletters category.
The MACE Excellence Awards takes place annually to recognise and celebrate excellence and the achievements of specialists and practitioners in marketing, advancement and communication in the higher-education sector. Both these awards were under the media division, which looks at the way institutions get their messages across to their target groups. The competition has three divisions namely; Campaigns, Media and Skills and has 30 categories. In the last two years the event was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
DUT’s Advancement and Alumni Relations Director, Zwakele Ngubane, whose department is responsible for publishing the DUTConnect expressed his excitement on this achievement.
“We are delighted at the news of winning a MACE Excellence Award for our DUT Connect Magazine publication. This is testament to the fact that hard work does pay off. We have made a few changes to the overall structure of the magazine and will be implementing more changes gradually over next few issues as we endeavour to continually improve and not rest on our laurels,” he said.
Ronelle Lyson, Alumni Relations Co-ordinator and Project Leader, echoed her sentiments that their team are very proud of this award and hope to achieve higher next year.
“The Autumn submission highlighted COVID-19 and articles were linked to this theme. The Summer submission highlighted DUT Rankings and to celebrate this we researched alumni who excelled in their field,” she said.
DUT’s Kareeshma Gayaparsad, Marketing Practitioner, expressed her excitement upon receiving the news of the recent MACE win.
“The campaign captured inclusiveness and created an identity of excellence using the message ‘NEXT LEVEL GRADUATES’ ensuring a level of prestige, that would be associated with the university, with a primary goal to raise DUT’s brand awareness. We also thank the staff at DUT and our advertising agency, @Assegai&Javelin for their amazing team effort, hard work and dedication throughout this campaign,” said Gayaparsad.
She relayed that the strategic thinking behind DUT’s ‘I AM DUT’ brand campaign and Cinema Advert was to symbolise a league of winners with a passion to succeed, a promise to change the future and a purpose to make a difference.
Conveying his excitement on DUT’s achievement, Senior Director of Corporate Affairs, Alan Khan said: “I am extremely proud of our team who worked so hard on the campaigns, events and projects. Winning awards is fantastic and being recognised by our peers in Higher Education is an immense honour. Excellence and professionalism are important principles of our ENVISION2030 strategy and the two MACE awards that DUT won exemplifies the excellence and professionalism that is entrenched at our university.”
Also sharing her congratulatory message, the Deputy Vice Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Engagement, Professor Sibusiso Moyo said: “I take this opportunity to congratulate both our Advancement and Alumni Relations Directorate together with our Corporate Affairs Division for advancing the work done in our core areas of Teaching, Learning, Research and Innovation. To a greater extent, scooping the two awards illustrates how deeply the University is engaged within the region, locally, nationally and internationally. It is also an acknowledgement to all our people’s contributions – staff, students, alumni and all our quad-helix partners. Thank you for all the support as we focus on implementing our values as part of ENVISION2030.”
Pictured: Screenshots of the two MACE awards recently awarded to DUT.
Simangele Zuma/Waheeda Peters.
