Radford University
As part of a comprehensive web redesign, Radford took a deep dive into all of the enrollment aspects of their website and their Slate experience.
Nuts &
Bolts
Timeline
January 2023 – June 2024, with ongoing follow-on work.
Project Scope
- Enrollment-focused stakeholder interviews
- UX Research (usability tests, interviews, surveys)
- Persona development & journey mapping
- Slate portal page recommendations
- Enrollment content for Admissions, Financial Aid & Degree Programs
- Enrollment journey conversion tracking
- Enrollment pathway explorations
- Slate form design and embeds
- UX and content recommendations
- Analytics tracking and data studio set-up
CMS
ModernCampus
Site Size
About 500 pages in the first launch
By focusing their web strategy on the enrollment experience, Radford was able to highlight their superpower: cultivating the student, faculty and alumni relationships in their inclusive community.
Radford University is a top-ranked school offering a wide variety of degree programs for undergrads, graduates, online students and competency-based learners across two campuses. This strength was being diluted across multiple sites where prospective students were having different experiences. They needed their site to present “one Radford”, and guide students along one cohesive enrollment journey.
Over time, their website had lost focus of its primary purpose- to serve as a marketing channel to drive enrollment for prospective students and their families. They knew they wanted to approach their redesign through an enrollment lens, weaving enrollment priorities throughout the whole project. They turned to NewCity to conduct an in-depth discovery and audience research phase which helped pave a way forward through sweeping changes to their IA, content strategy and messaging.
The result of the enrollment work is a clear, simple path to enrollment for their various audiences, a student-focused site navigation, and reimagined content that:
- Makes degree programs easily accessible.
- Provides clear information about cost and affordability.
- Showcases Radford’s exceptional level of student support and care.
- Highlights the character of the school and helps students understand if they’d fit in there.
The Enrollment aspects of the project included:
- Multi-day onsite workshops, including enrollment-focused stakeholder interviews and student and parent journey-mapping to understand leading indicators in the admissions and enrollment journey. These insights were used to design pathways and create content that maps to the prospective student’s need based on where they are in their journey.
- A Slate workshop to clarify Slate opportunities and goals. Findings were used to help Radford’s Slate technicians improve Slate pathways, remove barriers to important Slate access points and deliver a seamless UX experience to and through Slate portal pages and forms.
- Audience research (student interviews, baseline usability tests, unmoderated usability tests and surveys) to understand prospective student’s top needs and goals when visiting Radford’s website. These findings were used to develop a new content strategy that supports enrollment outcomes.
- Enrollment funnel pathway explorations and analytics tracking designed to support enrollment conversions like:
- Submit an RFI
- Schedule a visit
- Apply
- On-site IA and content planning workshops with Admissions and Financial Aid to help create improved pages that clearly and simply answer questions like “Can I get in?”, “Can I afford it?” and “What do I need to do to get ready for school?”. We used exercises like Core Content Modeling to help teams think about all of their content as a connected experience to support enrollment and retention.
Slate Portal Work for Admissions & Financial Aid
NewCity helped the Radford team clarify their Slate opportunities and goals. Then we used findings to help Radford’s Slate technicians improve on the integration of Slate properties as part of the UX, design and architecture of their web pages.
We planned Slate routing options, developed content for portal pages and redesigned Slate forms to align with Radford’s brand.
Part of the content planning for portals included:
- Prioritizing page goals.
- Defining the audiences that should be engaging with the content.
- Defining the desired activities.
- Answering student journey questions.
Want to talk enrollment strategy?
Enrollment Services is led by Robynne Lofton whose career spans 26 years in enrollment management positions.
