The Great Plains Conference communications team won 11 awards — including one best-of-class award — Feb. 22 at the annual gala for the United Methodist Association of Communicators in St. Louis.
The awards were presented for work completed in 2018 from annual conferences and local churches. General agencies compete in a separate category. The best-of-class awards represents the top prize among conferences, local churches and agencies combined.
Eugenio Hernandez, multimedia production specialist, won one of the Great Plains’ two first-place awards for his “Therefore Go” motion graphic to kick off the 2018 annual conference session. The graphic incorporated hundreds of short video clips of people from the Great Plains with a thundering musical intro to start the conference session.
Todd Seifert, communications director, won the other first-place prize for the slide show created for the series of town hall sessions hosted by Bishop Ruben Saenz Jr. in all 17 districts to discuss the options presented by the Commission on a Way Forward. The PowerPoint presentation won the best-of-class award in the media presentation category.
“When you’re in the room at a gala such as this, and you see all of the talent in one place, and you see all the tremendous work that goes into communications ministry, it’s incredibly rewarding to be recognized in any way for our work in the Great Plains,” Seifert said. “Our team loves telling the stories of ministry in Kansas and Nebraska, and we do our best every day to make sure the story of our collective faith in Christ is told in many different forms. Our focus always comes back to how what we do can help the local church succeed in its mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ."
Jayna McFarland, social media and website specialist, and Seifert won second place in the app category for development and enhancements for the conference’s mobile app, which includes a spiritual fitness measuring component.
David Burke, content specialist, won second place in the news article category for his coverage of the O’Neill (Nebraska) United Methodist Church’s response to an immigration bust and aftermath.
Hernandez won second place in the streaming category for his work on the broadcast of the 2018 annual conference session in Wichita.
The communications team won third place in the website category for www.greatplainsumc.org.
Hernandez won third place in the video news story category for his report on the 2018 VBS Shipwreck at Horizons Community Church in Lincoln, and he won third place in the video (production $2,000 or more) category for his work on videos from the 2018 annual conference session in Wichita.
Burke won third place in the article series category for his ongoing coverage of town hall meetings associated with the Commission on a Way Forward across the Great Plains.
And Seifert won third place in the blogs category for his “In Layman’s Terms” weekly blog.
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