Creating a New Alumni Website from Scratch
September 12, 2013
“Like Baking a Delicious Cake except instead of cake ingredients using the web, social media, email and user testing with a tablespoon of love.”
A good alumni relationship is important for any school, not only because alumni contribute so much to the university through job prospects, volunteer events, mentoring and giving back – and at Chapman that sentiment is noticeable through countless efforts of the entire University Advancement team, as well as those of us in Strategic Marketing and Communications. We’ve struggled in the past with allowing our alumni to stay in touch with us, as well as keep them up to date about all the exciting things happening at Chapman – and the solution was multi-faceted, involving many hands across several departments.
For years, the Chapman Alumni Association was using a different content management system to house our alumni website, which was hard to navigate, login protected, and overall cluttered to the point of confusion for our alumni base. For alumni of Chapman, as well as most other schools, one of the most important things to make as accessible as possible is transcript requests and a place to find out about upcoming alumni events and ways to support the school. With the current CMS this was difficult – and after much thought, research and user testing, our exploratory group determined that the software no longer supported the needs of the alumni department – but before we could move forward moving the content to a new CMS we had to have the facts to back up those claims.
Though Chapman’s Alumni Relations team has done a superb job reaching out to Alumni to increase participation in events, donations to the school, and keeping them informed of upcoming events there was only so much they could do without an easy to use point of reference of a well designed, new website. In order to create the best section for alumni we conducted multiple user tests with participants from our alumni base to determine which worked better: our current CMS or Cascade. The overwhelming majority of those tested were quickly able to locate all of the information needed (transcript requests, update contact information, and request an alumni ID card) within our new website. When tested with the existing CMS they had incredibly difficulty locating almost everything.
With a (relatively) fresh website with a beautiful redesign and updated content at our disposal, the decision was made to build a new section for alumni on our main domain chapman.edu. The decision was aided by the many limitations of our existing CMS, and we came to the conclusion that many of the services offered could easily be shifted to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and an updated Alumni blog and monthly newsletter. By doing this we planned to utilize the website as mainly a landing point for users to easily locate the information they needed, and utilize our external resources as easily as possible. Though oversaturation was always a concern, recent trends in social media have shown that individuals are more likely to connect with an alumni base via Facebook and Twitter – thus making these accounts extremely valuable for our goals.
Any alumnus of a school likes to get updates on the happenings around their alma mater, and Chapman alumni are no exception, but with a limited reach on social media, blogs, and the web there was only so much that could be done. Our first problem was that there was simply too much content within the current CMS – it was convoluted and crowded with unnecessary text, containing roughly 80 pages of content with information all over the place. Working alongside Hallie Nicholson of Strategic Engagement and Development, we were able to consolidate all of the pertinent information into close to half the amount of pages, recognizing the needs of our alumni base and tailoring the content to meet those needs.
A new, improved alumni newsletter was created as well utilizing a program called Campaign Monitor that was much more user friendly and easy to use. A template was designed by our office and users were trained how to use the new program. We currently send to an alumni base of 17,700 individuals with an average open rate of 16% – which sounds low, but is actually above average for institutional emails. Credit for this success belongs to Strategic Engagement and Development for their carefully tailored content creation and engaging information.
Chapman University can now proudly say that we have an amazing new alumni site that is very ease to use, contains all the information they are most likely to want, and has strengthened our alumni relations significantly. Though the groundwork has been laid, we have a long road ahead of us to ensure that our valuable alumni constituents continue to be engaged, supported, and informed.