CERN Alumni Second Collisions wins the prestigious CASE Circle of Excellence Gold Award
Since its creation in June 2017, the CERN Office for Alumni Relations has organised multiple events, but one in particular recently won a prestigious CASE (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) Circle of Excellence Gold award.
CASE’s annual Circle of Excellence Awards showcase outstanding work in advancement. The awards recognise exceptional achievement in advancement services, alumni relations, communications, fundraising, and marketing. These are the creative, inspiring projects that impact institutions and their communities—and transform lives around the globe. The 2022 awards celebrated work from 636 institutions from 28 countries, selected by panels of more than 600 volunteer judges. The event in question for which we won this prestigious award was CERN Alumni Second Collisions, held from 1 -3 October 2021.
Planning for the event began in late 2020, during the uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CERN Alumni Second Collisions organising team was keen to bring alumni back to CERN, for a large-scale reunion event. Due to travel and COVID-19 related restrictions preventing some alumni from coming back to CERN, we made the bold decision to bring CERN to our alumni. At the heart of Second Collisions was an online, immersive platform resembling CERN and its iconic buildings, leaving participants the freedom to roam around the CERN campus, enjoying virtual visits of the experimental facilities, inspiring talks from CERN Alumni, networking opportunities in a virtual R1 as well as the participation of CERN alumni start-ups and companies looking to recruit from within the CERN Alumni talent pool, hosted in virtual booths. Within the platform, the organising team hid a number of surprise 'easter eggs' for our alumni to discover and earn a place on the 'easter egg' leader board. In a post-event survey, one alum shared their appreciation of the event platform, “It created a sense of belonging to a unique community, sharing values and science with many people around the globe, from different nationalities, ages, sexes, etc.”
CERN Alumni Second Collisions was organised under the banner of "Research Matters - Alumni Impact on Society" and included speakers from sectors such as space, artificial intelligence, quantum, medtech, environment and sustainability, entrepreneurship and science communication. For the first time, bespoke, CERN designed and manufactured Second Collisions awards were distributed to alumni who have contributed to the development of the Network and those, nominated by the CERN Directors who have enjoyed remarkable career trajectories after their CERN experience. One Second Collisions participant commented, "It was amazing to see the impact that CERN Alumni are making in society”. Over the course of the coming weeks, in the digest, we shall be shining a spotlight on our CERN Alumni Second Collisions awardees.
The success of Second Collisions is thanks to the vision, creativity and commitment of all contributors involved. The organising team worked closely, over several months with the company Miltton Events, who were the first Estonian company to work with CERN following the country’s accession to Associate Member State status in 2021. The contract covered the design, provision and support of the virtual event. Furthermore, many CERN colleagues also contributed to the accomplishment of the event, either as facilitators of lively roundtable discussions, moderators during the inspiring talks, guides from the LHC experiments or as valuable volunteers guiding and assisting our virtual guests.
The CASE judges commented, "We felt this was a highly innovative event, with the virtual re-creation of the CERN site giving alumni the opportunity to revisit and explore iconic buildings and take part in a variety of activities from keynote speeches to networking. We liked the use of in-house resources to deliver the virtual environment and increase internal buy-in, with events moderated by CERN colleagues and alumni award recipients nominated by CERN directors. Judges also commented on the creative use of the virtual booths, which featured CERN spin-off and start up companies, as well as internal exhibits, and included job opportunities."
If you missed Second Collisions or are nostalgic and would like to revisit any of the talks, the underground visits or the awards ceremony, you can do so here: http://cern.ch/go/r9H9. Those of you looking forward to the next CERN Alumni reunion event will be thrilled to learn that on 21 February 2023, we held our first CERN Alumni Third Collisions organising team meeting. We can now reveal that Third Collisions is scheduled to take place early 2024 and we hope to welcome even more CERN Alumni back to CERN, and this time, in person!