Centennial Office’s Web site nominated for three awards
Posted on February 18, 2008
The Centennial Office submitted entries to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education district competition and is now a finalist for three awards. They are nominated for a grand award, a special events award, and an overall Web site design and implementation award.
“The grand award is like the gold medal,” said Fred Hilton, Centennial director. “The award of excellence is like silver.”
The Centennial Web site has already received one special merit award for the design and implementation category.
The grand award is the big prize, and JMU is up against The University of Tennessee and Virginia Commonwealth University.
“This competition is for a nine-state area, the southeastern United States,” Hilton said. “There are 4,000 members of district 3, and there were over 3,000 entries.”
The Centennial Office will find out if they won the grand award at a conference in Atlanta, Ga., on Feb. 17-20. Although Hilton will not be able to attend, he said the work will speak for itself.
“We have done an awful lot for the Centennial,” Hilton said. “Between the book, Centennial convocation and the walking tours, it had to be impressive.”
The Centennial Office entered the contest before the book came out, but it has been serialized in the newspaper so people could hear about it.
Plans for the celebration have been long in the making.
“The extent of the program, the Web site, took some elaborate planning with over 20 committees,” Hilton said. “Everyone has been involved throughout the university, the locals, everyone, and it has been going on for a year.”
All of the schools who made it to the final round of competition were nominated for different reasons.
“UT is up for their safety alert and VCU for their fundraising campaign,” Hilton said.
Hilton and the rest of his office was hard at work on the project to help make sure it was the best it could be. Many of those involved are overwhelmed to be finalists.
“It’s exciting, definitely a ‘wow,’” said Debra Long, assistant Centennial director. “I don’t know if there is anything else I can say.”
Long said the office took things day-by-day, especially for the Web.
“Fred wrote the stories, we picked the pictures together and formatted them for the web,” Long said. “As the Centennial progressed, we just kept adding things as they happened.”
Hilton is impressed with the result of all the work that was put in to planning the Centennial celebration.
“There were lots of people involved: graduate students, graduate assistants,” Hilton said. “It was a joint effort, and the whole university got involved. We had a good time doing it.”
