Dalhousie University
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Dwight Fischer
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CIO
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Dalhousie University
We needed fresh ideas coupled with practical experience to rapidly address this critical problem for us. As a leader in education, we needed to collaborate with a team who shared our passion for best in class solutions – NLC stood out and were clearly the right partner for us.
The Background
Inspiring minds for nearly two centuries, Dalhousie University provides world-class education coupled with legendary Maritime charm. Serving over 15,000 students across several campuses, Dalhousie attracts students from around the globe.
Today’s market for recruiting and retaining students is fiercely competitive and Dalhousie recognized that it needed to better market its message, brand and offering to attract the right student mix, ensuring that potential recruits understood the opportunity and value of a Dalhousie education.
Through an internal audit, Dalhousie discovered that it was operating over 300 web properties, each site driving varying messaging, using diverse tools and systems. This meant a lack of consistency in branding and content, as well as increased operational costs in managing all of these properties.
The Solution
Dalhousie worked with NLC by establishing a Governance Strategy, a critical first step as it ultimately sets the stage for branding, architecture, messaging and content. A strategy engagement as well as criteria for the selection of a new, common Content Management System provided the foundation for the ultimate goal of replacing more than 9 different technologies currently being used.
The project moved into a phased consolidation where the defined roadmap to merge 300 properties saw the first, most critical 9 assets combined under dal.ca. This also meant confirming the new architecture, designing the creative elements and implementing the CMS.
The next wave will involve student services, representing an additional 30 plus sites as well as program pages. By identifying the most critical properties, NLC devised a plan and migration strategy that is seeing the prioritized consolidation of websites responsible for 80% of the traffic relocating into the new system under the clearly established Governance strategy and framework for managing content.
The Outcome
Dalhousie has been able to:
• Better focus on recruitment and retention with a spiked interest in enrolment information.
• Build a scalable architecture that supports expansion.
• Eliminate old technology that was no longer supported.
• Consolidate technology for ease of support and a reduction of operational costs.
• Take advantage of new thinking and a fresh approach for the look and feel of their web properties, consistent with today’s web standards and emerging social networking trends.