Hult Alumni Magazine 2020
Editor-in-chief, Senior Content Creator
May 2019-February 2020
Brief
Instil pride and encourage engagement amongst the Hult alumni community.
Solution
Context
Hult Alumni Magazine had, in previous years, been the responsibility of the Career Development and Alumni Relations team. For 2020 the publication was brought under the remit of the creative department, whose recent and award-winning rebrand and editorial shift had placed a modern authenticity front and centre. For comparison, previous alumni magazine iterations had been weighty, both literally and figuratively; a one-way narrative between school and recipient, delivering information with little demonstrative engagement.
We started from scratch, stripping out heritage and roll-over pieces that no longer served a purpose. Looking to contemporary references (Monocle, Wired) the teams collectively settled on an editorial concept—The Future of Work—as a topical unifier for the piece. Drawing on the wider team we sourced names of influential and inspiring alumni to interview, whose faces and stories would sit front and centre, whilst exploring new and diversified formats for the content with our freelance design partner for the project, Studio Wan.
I interviewed around 40 alumni, in a diverse array of fields: fintech, healthcare data science, life coaching, social entrepreneurship, climate change advocacy, to name but a few. Questions went far beyond their Hult degrees, and even their day jobs—in this case, the greater the tangent the better, so as to encourage more personal and resonant narratives. The many hours of audio were distilled into 76 pages of features, taking shape as Q&As, first-person reflections, advice columns, and photo stories.
The print edition came off the press in early January, followed by the digital edition and surrounding social campaign. The magazine was used extensively by sales, marketing and the wider business as a key recruitment and retention tool for the 2020 academic year and beyond.