Fairmont State University Content Strategy Report cover page displayed on a tablet

Fairmont State Content Strategy

A website content strategy to support the student journey and increase enrollment at a small, public university.

Objective

 

With experience in higher education, I know that a great website is important for the admissions process and the student experience. When Fairmont State University (FSU), a public university in West Virginia, decided to redesign their flagship website to increase enrollment in a competitive higher education landscape their RFP focused on functionality and usability, but with little attention to content.

I decided to create a content strategy for a redesigned fairmontstate.edu to identify how better content could also help meet their goal.

Business Goals

 
 

I started by identifying the specific business goals related to increasing enrollment that content could impact:

  • Increase the number of students who apply to FSU

  • Increase the percentage of admitted students who enroll

  • Improve retention of current students

 

For each of these business goals, I also developed content objectives to support them.

Goal 1: Increase the number of students who apply to FSU

  • Connect prospective students to degree programs of most interest

  • Clearly communicate the application and financial aid process

Goal 2: Increase the percentage of admitted students who enroll

  • Demonstrate the value of an FSU education

  • Share about the student experience and community

Goal 3: Improve retention of current students

  • Connect students with the resources they need to stay engaged and succeed

  • Help students and their families easily navigate the college experience from first day to commencement

About the Users

While FSU’s website has many user groups, my strategy was created to focus on user groups most related to the 3 business goals I defined. I identified these to be:

 
people

User Groups

  • Parents, Families, Loved Ones of Prospective Students

  • Parents, Families, Loved Ones of Admitted Students

  • Parents, Families, Loved Ones of Current Students

  • Prospective Students

  • Admitted Students

  • Current Students

User Goals

Using my previously gained insights about higher education users, I identified the following user goals as being the most important for this strategy:

  • Explore academic programs and degrees the university offers

  • Find out admissions requirements, deadlines, and process

  • Learn how much FSU will cost, how to apply for financial aid, and pay bills

  • See what campus life is like, including facilities, residential life, and student services

  • Find courses, degree requirements, and academic support resources

  • Learn about campus events, organizations, and programming

Home page of fairmontstate.edu displayed on a laptop

Content Audit & Analysis

I began by examining FSU’s current site and content. This included focusing on architecture, writing, social media, and search engine optimization and accessibility using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider application.

From this audit, I found that current content does not align with business goals or the goals of the primary user groups that I’d identified for the strategy. In general, the FSU site content was utilitarian, lackluster, and even inaccessible in some cases.

Findings

Issues I identified included:

  • Content is mostly utilitarian text with few images or media

  • Pages are not formatted well or consistently

  • There is no consistent voice or writing style

  • There is no central location to find news or events

  • SEO page titles and descriptions are mostly missing

  • Images and videos are not ADA accessible

  • Site is not fully responsive and load speed is extremely slow

  • There is no internal site search function

 
 
searching

Recommendations

analyze

I found that content on the website needs a significant overhaul and should not be transferred as is onto the redesigned site as it is more a hurdle than a help for increasing applications, enrollment, and retention in its existing form. To better align content with business and user I goals, I developed a list of recommendations, including:

  • Focus more on storytelling and the people of FSU

  • Show, don't tell

  • Leverage social media and quality user-generated content

  • Help users find and focus on the content they need and want quickly

Strategy

To offer a memorable guiding light for the implementation of the content strategy I created a core strategy statement. I also created a messaging framework to explain what the desired first reaction to content is and what content should strive to prove to users about the university.

 

Core Strategy Statement

“To increase enrollment we will provide informative, inspiring, and approachable content that helps students and their families feel certain about choosing FSU and supported from their first visit through commencement and beyond.”

 

Messaging Framework

First Impression: "This seems like the right place for me."

Value Statement: "I feel empowered because I can find and understand information that helps me take action."

Proof: "They get what someone like me needs in order to successfully pursue a degree."

Design

I began design work by doing a competitive analysis of 3 fellow West Virginia universities' websites to identify opportunities for FSU. Specifically, I looked at:

  • Global navigation categories

  • How news and events were incorporated

  • Whether statistics or rankings were part of content and how they were displayed

  • If student quotes were used

  • How users discovered program offerings

  • If different user groups could self-identify to get audience-specific content

  • If content offered direction on next steps for users to complete tasks.

West Virginia University

 

Marshall University

 
 

Davis & Elkins College

Using insights from both my content analysis and competitive analysis, I developed a preliminary site map. This information architecture was designed to be fairly standard and predictive for users who will likely have visited many other higher ed sites and help them quickly find information related to the primary user goals I’d identified.

Redesigned site map for fairmontstate.edu
 

To create preliminary page wireframes I began by outlining in a prioritization table what information users and the university would find important for each of 5 key user scenarios in the admission and student experience. From here, I connected what core pages would help to support which business goals and the content that users and the university would need to be on each of these pages to find them helpful.

I then used these content lists to ensure my wireframes were on strategy and accounted for all relevant content.

 
Wireframe for an admissions page
 
Wireframe for an event page
 
Wireframe for a financial aid page
 
Wireframe for a housing option page
Wireframe for a program pagee
 

Writing Style

 

The brand’s identity is described as empowering, limitless, responsive, hardworking, genuine, and welcoming, so I developed writing style recommendations to reflect these traits, as well as offer a better experience for first-generation users.

Writing on the FSU site should be

  • Warm and helpful

  • Action- and goal-oriented

  • Use clear, concise, and as simple as possible language

  • Explain or define things like acronyms or university-specific language

  • Have a reading level of no higher than high school

  • Feature clearly labeled headings and sections, short sentences, short paragraphs, and bulleted lists

KPIs

Because goals don’t matter unless you have a way to measure success, I identified 3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to use to determine if the strategy is working or needs adjustment after implementation. The KPIs were:

  • Number of site interactions between admissions and users

  • Click-through rate for admitted students communications

  • Top reasons students leave FSU and traffic to pages with related content

 
 

Next Steps

moving forward
 

To implement and maintain my strategy, FSU would need to make a number of decisions and define content guidelines, including:

  • Choosing a content management model to follow

  • Assigning content-related roles and responsibilities

  • Creating and maintaining content authority

  • Defining workflow for content creation

  • Doing a content inventory on the current site

  • Choosing a specific writing style guide to follow

  • Creating a shareable writing style guide for distribution

  • Establishing an editorial calendar

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