The seventh of NewCity’s Seven Pillars of Higher Ed Digital Strategy is Establish a Platform and Rhythm for Growth. This is the foundation that supports all the other pillars. To make your foundation solid it needs four elements:
#1
The Right Roles & Governance
- Enrollment strategists, UXers, content strategists, editors, designers, marketers, technologists
- organized in a way that connects strategy to action
- with appropriate balance of institution-wide guidance and local empowerment
#2
A Flexible Design & Technology Platform
- A modular design system (brand standards, front end layout components) matched to
- a web content management system (CMS), and
- a customer relationship management system (CRM)
- with governance for when to add new features to the core system or create a branch for special purpose
- and training curriculum for the whole system
#3
Methods to Measure Success for Users and Organization
- Web analytics with view across all web properties
- CRM analytics tracking funnel behavior
- Integration between web and CRM analytics
- Tools to scrutinize behavior on high value pages – heat maps, usability testing
- Tools for assessing site quality, accessibility
- Parallel reports on key institutional goals (enrollment, media coverage, etc.)
#4
A Rhythm for Assessment and Iterative Improvement
- What to review weekly, monthly, quarterly, per campaign
- Clear ownership of this rhythm
- Criteria to prioritize future work
- Time and budget for implementing improvements, new features; periodically or ongoing
- Communications plan for leaders, stakeholders, site owners
If Pillar Seven is the foundation, why did we save it for last? These four elements can easily be treated as the whole of your digital strategy. Each takes a lot of work to build and maintain. But you can’t stop at the foundation. We want people to visualize what they can build on top of the foundation – where they can go with this platform in place.
For example, it’s hard to talk about shaping a unified student journey or creating content that shows the real experience of your brand if you’re fighting with clunky templates and a byzantine content management system. It’s also hard to persuade leadership of the importance of a unified strategy between enrollment and marcom without data connecting what’s happening on the web with what’s happening in your CRM and application.
Your organization may be at different stages of maturity in each of these four elements. We encourage you to make a roadmap showing where you are today and what the next one or two levels of maturity would be for you in each area. But you don’t have to wait until your foundation is perfect (it never will be) to pursue any of the other six pillars. They’re all integral to each other anyway. It’s something of an artificial exercise to separate them the way we have done in this series, but like any system it can be helpful to deconstruct it to consider each part, so that you have a better understanding of the whole.
Our goal with this whole Seven Pillars of Higher Ed Digital Strategy series is for you to see these pillars at work within your own context, recognize where your organization is with all seven, and be intentional about putting thought and energy to the areas that will have the greatest impact on your long-term success.
We’ve written extensively about each of these four foundation elements, and we have favorite resources we turn to for insight in each.
Reading List for Each Foundation Element
The Right Roles and Governance
A Flexible Design & Technology Platform
Methods to Measure Success for Users and Your Organization
A Rhythm for Assessment and Iterative Improvement
Engage with NewCity for Your Foundation
These are some of the ways we work with our partners to develop and improve their foundation:
Some of our service offerings:
Questions?
Thanks for joining our 7 Pillars of Higher Ed Digital Strategy journey. We hope you are able to apply some of these concepts, strategies and recommendations to your own digital ecosystem. If you’d like to talk to us about any piece of it, schedule a discovery call with our team. We’d love to know more about your institution’s goals and challenges.
David is the founder and president of NewCity. He teaches workshops on UX and content strategy.
