Winners of the ACE gold award for a media relations campaign were, left to right, Frankie Gould, Kathy Kramer and Linda Benedict. Faith Peppers, right, from the University of Georgia, presented the award at the meeting in Indianapolis, Ind. (Photo by Bruce Sundeen)

News Release Distributed 07/10/13

BATON ROUGE, La. – Fifteen people from the LSU AgCenter have won awards in the annual competition of the Association for Communication Excellence, an international professional organization.

Faculty members in Communications received gold awards for a media relations campaign, a direct mail package and two 30-second video spots that promoted 125 years of agricultural research at the AgCenter.

Receiving awards for the media relations campaign were Linda Benedict, associate director; Randy LaBauve and Craig Gautreaux, both video producers; Tobie Blanchard, associate specialist; Rick Bogren, science writer; Johnny Morgan, specialist; Bruce Schultz, assistant specialist; Kathy Kramer and Matt Faust, both graphic designers; Ronda Clark, administrative assistant; Elma Sue McCallum and John Wozniak, both assistant directors, and Frankie Gould, director.

The direct mail package award winners were Kramer, Benedict, Bogren, LaBauve and McCallum. LaBauve was the producer of the winning video spots.

In addition, Blanchard and Gautreaux won a silver award for a video news release about the AgCenter’s Strong Women health education program.

Gold awards went to Sandy Fiser, assistant director, and Megan Smith, designer and analyst, both in Information Technology, for the logo used to promote the 2012 National Extension Technology Conference in New Orleans. They won a silver award and an honorable mention for the rotating background images on the front page of the AgCenter website.

Linda Foster Benedict