In 2014 the school asked me to move from running the Digital Design program to a new role across all of it: innovation and user experience. Revenue had fallen by almost a fifth in eighteen months. The brief, as it arrived, was a new website.
The website did need replacing. It had been built in 2000, patched twice since, and had grown past four hundred pages. People used the home page as a reset button. Admissions advisors spent hours on the phone walking applicants through it, and when we asked students what had made up their minds, they named the advisor, not the site.
Every program had its own explanation for the fall. None of them had the same numbers.
There were thirteen programs, and they were not alike. Writing needs writers and a room. Digital Design needed computers that doubled as a render farm. Some programs were small and some were broad, and each saw the school through its own enrolment. Marketing was measured on leads and admissions on students, and their two systems did not even call an applicant by the same name.
So before the site, we built one picture: for every program, what we spent to find students, what came back, how much we discounted, and which classes were filling for the next intake.
The picture overturned my own plan.
My plan for the year said we leaned too hard on paid search and needed to depend on it less. The numbers said otherwise. As we spent more on digital advertising, each dollar kept bringing back about what the last one had. We never found the point where it stopped paying.
That changed the question leadership was asking. It stopped being how much to spend and became where: the next dollar went behind the classes with empty seats, not the ones that would fill anyway.
Each of these needed the others.
A voice for every program. The brand work ran through the heads of the thirteen programs. They described what the year was really like, and that became how the school described itself. Outside, the line stayed Results Matter, with the promise that students leave with the confidence to author their own careers. Inside, we were honest that too many students were surviving the year rather than thriving in it, and that gap became the brief for everything else.
One record of every applicant. A new CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, so marketing and admissions were looking at the same person.
A site that does the advisor's first hour. From over four hundred pages to about thirty-five, planned around search from the start, with every path ending in a conversation with an advisor. Applicants found the answers themselves, and advisors spent their time with the people ready to decide.
A new market. When the school opened a campus in Shanghai, I led the brand strategy and helped with the marketing and curriculum choices. International scholarship campaigns ran alongside it.
Over the next year, applicants converted 27% more often, and calls to advisors fell 49%, because people could find answers themselves. Traffic grew 62% across paid and organic search, enrolment rose 25%, and revenue rose 18% year over year. By the time I moved on, revenue was back to where it had been before the fall.
It had a cost. Every page we cut was something a program had asked for, and once every program could see every other one, some conversations got harder before they got better. The site was carried by our consumer-insight lead and a small team we ran like a start-up inside the school. The brand belonged as much to the heads of department as to me.
The argument changes when everyone is looking at the same picture.