Objective
Create modern website for Columbia University’s newest campus that would alert target audiences with relevant information about enhanced degree programs, state of the art laboratories, and free wellness and education resources for people of all ages.
Challenge
- Include content to demonstrate how the University was meeting community benefits agreements (CBAs) signed with the City of New York.
- Support content strategy with low-tech back-end manageable by editorial team.
- Manage project with engineering team that works in Agile, while client and stakeholders work in Waterfall.
- Align multiple, non-cohesive business objectives.
- Coordinate external design agency with in-house cross-functional team.
My Role
- Partnered with Project Manager to create the user story in Jira
- Provided product requirements for both front-end and back-end features
- Settled on a Drupal-based content management system
- Developed information architecture and an SEO strategy
- Worked with external design agency to adapt mock-ups to Drupal CMS
- Conducted functional testing of Drupal software. Reported bugs and adjusted features
- Collaborated with PR and marketing team to spread the word about the new website, and place strategic backlinks.
- Produced web traffic data analytics reports to optimize marketing strategies for reaching intended audiences.
Result
- Manhattan Community Board 9 published link to Manhattanville on their homepage. This created steady and substantial web traffic flow from a neighborhood community, one of our target audiences.
- Generated earned media attention from pages, content, and SEO on the campus’ architecture. The Obama Foundation Scholars set up offices in one of the new buildings with access to the local community.
- Non-tech content and editorial team quickly learned and was able to use the CMS.
- Received backlinks from a handful of websites ranking business schools, which provided steady flow of prospective students to content related to future Columbia Business School buildings in Manhattanville.
- Publishing construction updates and announcements in English and Spanish met requirements of CBAs.
