University News Aggregation Platform

Strategy and Background

Saint Mary’s has a busy undergraduate campus in Winona, MN and a thriving graduate campus in Minneapolis, MN. Faculty, Staff, Student groups, and others frequently had messages about important deadlines or activities to communicate to students. Occasionally during busy times of the year this could result in 10+ emails being sent to each student on a single day. Each of these emails needed to be manually sent out by the communications department, and if it came from the official comms team, it was expected that it would be well proofed and formatted correctly. The equivalent of a FTE employee got pulled into this job. Democratizing and automating this process could free up resources from the communications team, while providing a better overall experience for faculty and staff.

The Plan

Create a new platform that would become the hub of communication for campus life, news, announcements, and updates. Aggregate this news into segment specific emails to ensure users were getting only news and updates relevant for them.

Unique Challenges

• One of the key stakeholders had a very limited design vision. I had to win alignment for my vision of a much more robust, modern looking website, while ensuring that it didn’t add extensive costs or delay the project.
• Due to the number of stakeholders who would be publishing, we didn’t want to bring them into the WordPress admin. This meant we needed to allow for frontend publishing and editing of current stories.
• Although Mailchimp had an RSS digest feature, the default format did not meet our needs which meant a fully custom HTML email template that supported Mailchimp’s RSS feed markup features.

Execution

• Conducted extensive discovery and user research to understand current workflows of communications team and to determine the oversight they needed to maintain over the new platform
• Collaborated with key stakeholders to define requirements for platform features and to align on project vision
• Researched technology and determined that we could accomplish the project goals utilizing WordPress and MailChimp RSS notification feature
• Setup the WordPress site and completed core website design and plugin configuration that would allow faculty to create/edit articles via frontend forms and not have to login to a more complicated WordPress Admin interface
• Hired a contract developer for required plugin modifications
• Utilized an LDAP plugin to allowing IT to easily manage provisioned users
• Coded custom HTML email templates utilizing Mailchimp’s RSS merge tag features and scheduled sending
• Conducted extensive testing of emails using Litmus, and of the platform end-to-end
• Collaborated with faculty and staff for platform launch and training