Mount St. Mary's University

Services Delivered:

• Migration into SiteExecutive Web
  content management software
• Web design

Client:

Mount St. Mary’s University (the Mount), the nation’s second-oldest private Catholic university, is located in Emmitsburg, Maryland. With an enrollment of approximately 1,800 students, the Mount is known for its strong academic programs, vibrant campus life and its four pillars – faith, discovery, leadership and community.

Situation:

For the highly regarded University, which this year enrolled a record freshman class, student engagement – with current and prospective students – is a top priority.  And, like so many other schools, meeting admissions goals is a critical measure of success and highlights the primary purpose of the website.

“One of the things we know about admissions is you don’t get a second chance with students,” said Michael Post, the University’s Vice President for Enrollment Management. “If they have a negative experience on your website, they’re gone, and they’re probably never coming back.”

Acknowledging a student’s online experience can make or break the admissions process, the University believed its website, which had not been redesigned for a number of years, was impeding enrollment.

Challenge:

In addition to the site’s visual design being dated, its navigation confused site visitors. Students, parents and even faculty were unable to find what they were looking for on the site. As evidenced by site analytics data, like high bounce rates, visitors were frequently abandoning the admissions funnel, exiting pages before finding the information they needed to apply or schedule campus visits.

The website was also frustrating a number of the Mount’s internal content authors. Even though they had an easy-to-use content management system – the school had migrated the site from a .Net Web content management system to a hosted instance of SiteExecutive™ in 2008 – content authors did not take pride in the site, and over time reduced the frequency of content updates, further diminishing its effectiveness.

Understanding how the site was causing the university to lose potential students, the Mount took action to redesign the website. According to Post, “It was very hard for students to even apply. The website was not fulfilling its potential, it had to be changed.”

Working on a tight budget, Mount St. Mary’s initially hired a solo design consultant to lead the redevelopment project.  Unfortunately, this attempt failed to meet the school’s expectations, so the Mount came back to the company they most trusted.

“Recognizing the importance of this project, we engaged Systems Alliance, because we knew we could trust them to deliver strong results,” said Post.

Solution:

To fulfill the Mount’s need for a more engaging, easy to navigate and user-friendly website, Systems Alliance built a redevelopment plan around the three dimensions of Web Effectiveness, focusing on: 1) the site visitor experience, 2) the needs of content managers and content management processes and 3) the site’s technology platform. At a high level, the objective was to align Mount St. Mary’s Web design, strategy and technology with its business model and objectives.

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