The Origami Wolf Content Campaign
The ChallengeNC State's Accolades magazine faced the same challenge confronting many institutions today. Audiences are inundated with content and increasingly disconnected from traditional print publications.
The goal wasn't simply to increase website traffic. The goal was to create an experience that inspired people to engage with the content, share it, and continue their journey across channels.
THE AH-HA MomentI served as the lead on this project—connecting strategy, design, content, digital, and social teams around a shared creative direction and ensuring the work translated seamlessly across every channel.
Our job was to build and launch a digital magazine for the college, while also retaining a print medium to announce the digital platform and encourage engagement. Working within a print budget of less than $5,000, we had one constraint from the start: the idea had to be low-cost, but high-impact.
Our partners in CHASS initially explored adding physical premiums, such as stickers, to the mailer. But I knew that approach would increase production and mailing costs, limiting scale. So I somewhat jokingly reframed the problem: what could we create using only the paper we were already printing?
My first concept was a simple interactive fold—a picture frame embedded in the mailer that invited recipients to share framed photos back with us. It was solid, but not distinctive.
The breakthrough came when I saw origami swans at one of our designers’ desks and asked a different question: CAN WE MAKE AN ORIGAMI WOLF??
Admittedly, the initial concept was about FUN, but we quickly gathered all the teams to align hook into each medium - the digital, the print, the social - to create an experience and not just a one-off idea.
And that’s what led to the origami wolf.
From there, the challenge became turning a printed piece into a bridge between physical engagement and digital storytelling—something playful enough to invite participation, but meaningful enough to draw audiences into the Accolades experience.
The result was a tactile, low-cost activation that worked across age groups and created a natural pathway into a deeper digital narrative ecosystem.
It also created a powerful pathway into a natural social engagement campaign.
ImpactThe campaign expanded into:
Snackable social video content
An instructional video embedded within the digital magazine
The #NCStateWolf social activation
Audience participation across alumni, donors, students, and supporters
What began as a print piece became a connected storytelling ecosystem spanning print, digital, video, and social media. And the little wolf lives on today at many Packapolloozas!
