2026 Excellence & Innovation Award Winners

Rising Star Award

Rich Herbst — Duke University

• Transitioned from fighter pilot and private sector executive to higher education — bringing a fresh, outside perspective to alumni career services
• Built Duke's alumni industry group program largely from scratch, engaging thousands of new alumni and creating dozens of new volunteer roles
• Achieved significant scale with minimal resources: under $3,000/year and 1.3 FTEs
• Created a model others in the field have long sought but rarely achieved

Rich Herbst is the kind of Rising Star who makes you rethink what “new to the field” can look like. He didn’t come up through higher education — he came through a career as a fighter pilot and a subsequent executive role in the private sector, and he brought that unconventional lens directly to bear on one of alumni career services’ most stubborn challenges: alumni industry groups. Many ACSN member institutions have tried to build these and struggled. Rich built one that works. His model is alumni-driven but strategically connected to Duke’s goals — it preserves data integrity while giving alumni genuine freedom to build their own networks and give back to one another. He’s engaged thousands of new alumni, created dozens of new volunteer roles, and done it with a budget under $3,000 and barely more than one FTE. What makes Rich a standout isn’t just what he built — it’s that he built something the field can learn from.

Marketing & Communications Award

Alissa Clark — University of Pittsburgh

• Created the Pitt Alumni Job Search Accelerator — a five-week, automated email journey delivering structured career coaching to alumni on demand
• Launched with zero dedicated budget using existing institutional platforms
• Each enrolled alumnus generates up to nine CASE-trackable communication interactions
• Captured new contact information for an estimated 65% of sign-ups — a major data win ahead of Pitt’s upcoming comprehensive campaign

Alissa Clark’s submission stood out for the elegance of its design: one initiative that simultaneously serves alumni and advances institutional strategy. The Job Search Accelerator meets alumni where they are — not at a scheduled webinar they may never know about, but in their inbox, at the moment they actually need career support. Built entirely through internal collaboration with no dedicated budget, it delivers a structured, coach-like experience across seven emails covering the full job search lifecycle, complete with reflection worksheets, AI prompts, and curated resources. Once built, it runs itself. From an institutional standpoint, the program is a multiplier — each enrolled alumnus generates up to nine trackable CASE communications interactions — and it’s already surfacing new contact data for 65% of participants ahead of a major campaign. It’s a model that any alumni career team, regardless of size or budget, could realistically replicate.

Career Programming Award

Sydney Annas — University of Colorado Boulder

• Founded and facilitates First Step Connect, a free weekly virtual career group for CU Boulder alumni navigating transitions
• Grounded in evidence-based career development frameworks — not just a drop-in session, but a structured, repeatable program
• Served over 100 alumni in its first year with no ongoing budget
• Designed from the start to be scalable and replicable across institutions

What Sydney Annas built with First Step Connect is deceptively simple and genuinely thoughtful. At its core, it’s a free weekly virtual group — but it’s built on a real theoretical foundation, integrating tools like the Five Degrees of Career Transition model and a structured framework that moves participants through self-assessment, exploration, networking, and job search planning. It’s not a one-time workshop and it’s not a passive resource library. It’s a low-barrier, high-structure entry point that meets alumni exactly when they’re in transition — and it complements individual advising rather than competing with it, helping alumni arrive at one-on-one appointments with more clarity and focus. Sydney developed it with a team of three and now runs it solo, with no ongoing budget. In its first year it served over 100 alumni, and participants describe it as the kind of support that made them feel less alone while also giving them tools they could use immediately. That combination — rigorous and human — is hard to pull off, and it’s what makes this program a model worth sharing.