Core Strategy: Attract Students & Move Them Forward
UNCW’s website is a tool the university uses to reach its strategic goals. As a tool, the website does not serve all goals equally. These anchor the website’s content goals:
- Attract high-achieving and diverse prospective students.
- Provide quality content with a unified voice.
- Engage external audiences with UNCW’s internal and community stories.
Task
For the content under your care, clarify how it contributes to these goals. Identify any subgoals this content must serve.
As you select, edit, shape and revise content for your site, mold it toward those ends.
Know Your Audience
The core strategy presumes an audience for the website. This generic “audience” has been broken down into a set of audience segments of varying importance to the website goals:
- Prospective undergraduate students
- Prospective graduate students
- Current students
- Faculty and staff
- Alumni
- Funders and donors
- Community partners
- Community colleges
- International education partnerships
- Centers and institutes
- Foundations, agencies and other research funders
- Peer institutions
These priorities reflect the overall site’s focus.
Task
For the content under your care, clarify which audience(s) you must address to reach your goals.
Move Users to Countable Actions
How can you tell whether your content is doing its job?
Create a clear action you want your audience to take. For the institution’s top audience (prospective undergraduate and graduate students), we want them to apply and enroll. These are that audience’s conversions. Counting conversions is a common KPI (key performance indicator).
However, to get to applying or enrolling, your prospective students will take other actions first, things we might call micro conversions:
- Look over possible majors
- Take the virtual tour
- Watch videos from current students
- Skim through alumni success stories
- Schedule a campus visit&;
Micro conversions are also countable actions. Countable actions become metrics that helps us understand whether the content is doing its job or whether it needs further refinement.
Task
Identify the action your audience should take and whether there’s a countable web action as part of that.
