The Heist Awards Are Back With a Bang!

The Heist Awards are the premium awards for the education marketing sector – celebrating everything about student recruitment, engagement, marketing and communications for universities and colleges around the world.

After having to celebrate their 30 year anniversary in a virtual ceremony during lockdown in 2020, Heist Award hosts Havas Education were delighted to be back to a real, in-person event for 2022, at The Kimpton Clocktower Hotel in Manchester – and the theme was Back with a Bang!

The Heist Awards – 32 years of excellence in education marketing

As part of one of the world’s largest communications networks (Havas Group), Havas Education has been supporting the education sector for over three decades.

Their awards cover excellence in a huge range of disciplines, from Best Student Recruitment Campaign, Best Use of Content and Best Open Day Experience to Rising Star Awards and Marketing Team of the Year – and everything in between!

Designing the Heist Awards trophy

The Heist Awards trophy needed to bring to life the theme of “back with a bang”, reflecting the bright colours and explosive graphics of the event branding. As well as that, the main focus needed to be the Heist logo – a block capital H.

The idea was to make the Heist Awards’ ‘H’ an iconic symbol in the sector, that would be instantly recognisable across printed assets, online materials and of course, on the shelves of our prestigious winners.

Havas Education wanted the trophy to feel special, weighty and iconic – but at the same time, it was important to consider how easy it would be to carry or hold the trophy on the night. 

Creating a sustainable award

With the pressing climate crisis and universities and colleges working tirelessly to improve sustainable practices at their institutions, Havas Education know just how important it is for their entire event to be as sustainable as possible – which meant sourcing a sustainable trophy too.

Luckily, sustainability is something that EFX can handle! The final design was a recycled aluminium and recycled acrylic award, and was all boxed and packed using our eco-friendly packaging too.

Creating the Heist Award with EFX

Hannah Reeve, Global Marketing Manager, Havas Education talks about her experience of working with EFX.

“We actually reached out to a number of awards suppliers this year, with the intention of choosing a trophy design we can continue to use year on year to solidify an identity for our Heist awards. 

Like the logo, our trophies have changed a lot over the years and we felt like the return to a physical event after 3 years away was the right time to make changes and start to form a new identity for The Heist Awards. EFX took this brief on board, understood our vision and brought to life our logo in their initial designs, solidifying them as our chosen supplier.

When the initial designs came back from EFX, our Lead Creative suggested the idea of a cut out ‘H’ in the centre of the trophy. EFX took the idea on board straight away, making it work as close to our budget as they could, and got the revised designs and quotes back to us promptly. We absolutely loved the result.”

The design and manufacturing process wasn’t without its challenges either. The first issue was a shortage of the 3mm recycled black acrylic required. However, the quick solution was to source a slightly thicker alternative, which we believe has only improved the finished design.

A welcome return to in-person awards with the Heist Awards

It was an incredibly special evening at The Kimpton Clocktower Hotel, seeing the sector back together again, celebrating the past few difficult but triumphant years for the industry.

Hannah Reeve: ”We were absolutely delighted with the quality of the trophies. Not only did they feel completely bespoke, they totally brought our ‘back with a bang’ vision to life, they felt a good quality, weighty and therefore expensive and special trophy to win and went down incredibly well on the evening.”