University Of South Dakota Alumni Association Recreates The Experience Of Coming Home Online 3985

University Of South Dakota Alumni Association Recreates The Experience Of Coming Home Online

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The University of South Dakota Alumni Association had lofty goals when they began designing their new NetCommunity site earlier this year. “We wanted alumni to feel the same sense of nostalgia, pride, and homecoming as they do driving into town for the first time in months, years, or even decades,” recalls Stephanie Austin, Associate Director of Communications at the University of South Dakota Alumni Association. “The functionality had to be there but we also wanted all the warm fuzzies.”
 
bc86323d9dd852c2981eeb6f0f34fb53-huge-usFor just about any institution, recreating that real life alumni experience of returning to campus on their website is an ambitious goal. However, this was especially true for an organization that hadn’t revisited the design of their website for nearly a decade. “It was time for something new,” says Stephanie.

As project manager, Stephanie led the seven members of the Constituent Engagement team through the process of completely revamping the Alumni Association’s website. They began with background research on other organizations’ websites that embodied the look and feel that they wanted to recreate at the University of South Dakota.


In addition to the aesthetics of the website, the Constituent Engagement team wanted to completely overhaul the content for the website. Following the strategic alignment of the University of South Dakota Foundation and Alumni Association, a new strategic plan was developed for the alumni association, providing plenty of materials articulating a new vision for the organization that the team could reference as they developed new content.
 
Once the team came to agreement regarding their ideas for the new website, the University of South Dakota Alumni Association worked with Blackbaud to translate those objectives into an actual website. Stephanie’s team came to initial meetings with five websites that embodied what they hoped to accomplish with their redesign, as well as some beautiful video footage that they hoped to incorporate into the new website.
 

Initial calls between the University of South Dakota Foundation and Blackbaud teams covered sample layouts, desired navigation, and sought to identify the top three outcomes they hoped to achieve when alumni came to the website. “(Blackbuad Web Developer) Matt Cira was great,” Stephanie recalls, “he was always responsive and he really hit the nail on the head with the design.”

The University of South Dakota Alumni Association’s new alumni website is responsive, capable of delivering a compelling user experience on any device. However, the desktop view might be what resonates most with their alumni. When viewed on a desktop, the website incorporates eye-catching video of campus into the header, effectively recreating the experience of returning to campus and delivering the “warm fuzzies” that Stephanie envisioned when she initially set out to build a new website.

The creative use of video on the home page is certainly unique, but the rest of the website is equally well-designed. Beautiful imagery from campus is sprinkled throughout each page of the intuitive website, and those aesthetics are complimented by concise writing designed to compel alumni to re-engage with their alma mater.


2b06e5a8a59583502f9cb01c80039029-huge-usSo far, the response to the website from the University of South Dakota alumni community has been overwhelmingly positive, albeit on a limited basis. “We launched the site July 1, a quiet time of year for the Alumni Association,” says Stephanie. “We expect to receive more feedback as we approach homecoming and drive additional traffic to the site.”
 
The most encouraging feedback has come from the rest of the university community. “Our staff and university partners feel the new website is much more representative of who we are as an organization and where we want to go,” says Stephanie. She also has found that the Alumni Association’s website has helped create a more cohesive online presence between the alumni association, the foundation, and the university. “We look like a cohesive family of organizations. I would credit Matt with that, he really kept the other sites top of mind.”
News ARCHIVED | Blackbaud NetCommunity™ Blog 09/19/2017 3:24pm EDT

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