Issue:  In 2007, VCU School of Business was undergoing a dramatic transformation.  The school was getting ready to move into a 145,000 sq ft state of the art new building co-located with the School of Engineering.  The School of Business was also looking to educate prospective students about the significant advantages the school has to offer. Additionally, it was looking to engage and inform other stakeholder such as Current Students, Faculty, Alumni and the Business Community.   However, the school was attempting to speak to this highly web-savvy audience with a static html based site, some pages of which had not been updated since 1997!

Strategy:  Spinnaker Edge Consulting was brought in to create a strategy to migrate the school into a more up-to-date site and then design and develop the site.  Our first challenge was to convince the faculty on the viability of using an Open Source Content Management System (CMS).  We firmly believe in the democratization of content creation - this being especially true for VCU SOB.  Content knowledge lives in the various departments and institutes, but in the past had to be funneled to a single html developer who then updated the site - no wonder it was out of date.  Thanks to the user-friendly authoring tools on the CMS, content could be created by owners and then placed in a moderation queue (workflow process) before it is approved for publication.  Our first step was to develop a prototype that was approved with great enthusiasm by the Deans.  Secondly, we decided to develop the site in a phased manner to manage scope and schedule the launch in time for the inauguration of the new building.

The Design direction given to us was to make the site look "Business Like" without forsaking the Academic look and feel.  We decided to have a dual navigation path (role-based navigation and direct navigation) to encourage users who wished to browse and at the same time, provide efficient site traversal for those who were looking for specific information.  A unique and innovative feature added was to  include short video clips of alumni in each of the majors talking about the nature of their current work and how an education at VCU School of Business enabled them to be successful in their present jobs.  This was aimed at prospective students to show them the range of course offerings and the tangible benefits of a VCU Business education.  We also worked with the Dean to create the Dean's Blog as a channel to communicate with students, alumni, faculty and business what his vision for the school is and to comment on on-going developments.  However, we chose to close off comments to minimize the potential for mischief and mal-intent.  The site is full of action shots of actual students going about their day and includes slide shows, graphical depiction of school statistics and web-forms for alumni to update their information.

Results: VCU School of Business has seen an immediate ROI.  Out-of-State admissions to the school have increased by a whopping 27.8% (the school gets to keep the delta in fees) despite a flat out-reach effort.  Some of this increase can be attributed to the new School of Business building, but there is a high likelihood that the new site contributed to the increase. While we haven't surveyed students to determine the extent to which the site played a role in their decision to attend VCU, it is highly likely that the website was the primary source for information for these new students.  Complimentary comments from Alumni, Faculty and Students confirm that we have achieved out Guiding Principal, first articulated by the famous Greek architect Vitruvious - firmita, utilita, venustas - the structure must be strong, useful and beautiful.  Our goal for this project was to build a website that is durable and not crash, provide useful and up-to-date information.  Andy finally, one that is beautiful and delight the user, so they return repeatedly.

Before	After