Heita! wins Silver Award of Excellence at MACE 2025 for Arts Festival edition
- Gerrit Bester
- Nov 17
- 4 min read
Heita!, TUT’s electronic student newsletter, scooped a Silver Award of Excellence at the Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Excellence Awards, held at the Indaba Hotel in Fourways, Johannesburg, on 13 November. The MACE Excellence Awards celebrate outstanding achievement by specialists and practitioners in marketing, advancement and communication within the higher-education sector, recognising excellence on an annual basis.
Gerrit Bester, Industrial Editor at Corporate Affairs and Marketing (CA&M) and Editor of Heita!, explains that a special edition of Heita! centred on the sixth TUT Arts Festival (2024) was entered in the Skills Category (Design for Digital Media) of this year’s competition and earned TUT the accolade.
This category honours excellence in electronic and interactive communication channels, including websites, online stores, electronic newsletters, electronic annual reports, special publications, CDs or DVDs, e-cards and banner ads, produced for internal or external audiences via digital delivery.
“To be recognised by your peers for excellence is always a feather in one’s cap,” says Bester, who accepted the award.
Heita! is TUT’s longest-running online student newsletter (within the CA&M portfolio), active for 17 years.
With a magazine-like feel, it delivers fresh, original content not published elsewhere on TUT platforms. The editorial approach invites students to share their views on topics that matter to them, reflecting the tagline Students @ the Centre. The editor oversees all content and layout, working with an external provider that distributes to a 60 000-strong, annually updated student email database.
“To creatively capture the vibrant atmosphere of the Arts Festival, Heita! collaborated with talented Commercial Photography staff and students from the Department of Visual Communication, Faculty of Arts and Design, for this edition,” Bester notes. “This partnership extends a longstanding relationship in which Heita! has routinely used student photographs as cover images for many years.”
The primary aim of this Heita! edition was to visually capture the energy, diversity and creativity of the 2024 TUT Arts Festival through compelling imagery. It sought to celebrate student talent, reinforce the themes of Artivism and Manufacturing Joy and foster pride within the student body and the wider University community.
Key objectives included collaborating with Commercial Photography students for documentation, providing practical experience and portfolio development and telling a primarily image-driven story with minimal captions to maximise artistic impact. The publication also aimed to showcase the festival’s highlights to attract prospective students, industry partners and community stakeholders, while fostering a sense of pride by spotlighting students’ artistic contributions through powerful visual storytelling.
“Our partnership with Heita! stretches back over a decade. Year after year, Heita! invites our students to contribute cover imagery and feature photography, effectively turning every issue into a living classroom,” says Hein Grové, Section Head: Commercial Photography and Acting Head: Department of Visual Communication.
“The newsletter gains fresh visual voices; our students gain authentic industry mentorship and the confidence that their work can hold its own on a national stage. Within the Department of Visual Communication, this relationship has become a cornerstone of our academic project, where we celebrate the published outcomes and leverage them as encouragement.”
“From an academic standpoint, the project validated our curriculum’s emphasis on experiential learning and community engagement. It demonstrated to internal stakeholders that a skills-rich partnership can simultaneously advance scholarship, student employability and the University’s public profile,” Grové adds.
Bester extends thanks to staff and students of the Department of Visual Communication (Commercial Photography); Irene Botes, Marketer at the Faculty of Arts and Design; and to EPICreative, the designers, for collaborating on this edition.
“This award is also theirs,” he concludes.
In congratulating Bester, Willa de Ruyter-Kaempffer, Channels Manager at CA&M, says: “The MACE Excellence Awards is a great opportunity for benchmarking one’s work against that of peers in the sector. From a total of 309 entries, Bester was among only 57 recipients of Silver Awards of Excellence. We are proud of Bester’s consistent high quality of work, creativity and commitment to excellent communication being recongised by his peers and the sector.”
The awards formed part of the 2025 MACE annual conference, themed The Human Touch: Marketing, Advancement and Communication in the era of social media and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Since its inception, Heita! has been recognised multiple times, including by the SA Publication Forum (SAPF), which named it Best Electronic Newsletter in its first year of publication. This competition provides a benchmarking platform and a community of practice for publication practitioners in South Africa.
Bester’s work has also earned recognition from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), culminating in a Gold Quill merit award presented in Toronto, Canada, in 2014 for a 10-year commemorative calendar of the University. The project was also a collaborative effort with the Department of Visual Communication and represents the highest honour a communications practitioner can receive.
CLICK ON: https://heitatut.co.za/Vol16no7and8/#page=1 (desktop version) or https://heitatut.co.za/Vol16no7and8-mobile/#page=1 (mobile version).
