Creating such a website is actually relatively simple. Here are the six essential steps to customizing your portal to establish a successful brand for your institution.
Step 1 – Roadmap. Determine your long and short term goals. Start by creating a project team tasked with understanding how the portal can support your brand. This includes defining the portal’s immediate needs, the longer term vision for it, and how it will need to evolve over time. By gathering input from all key campus stakeholders (i.e., students, their families, faculty, alumna, administrators, and the local community), the project team can shortlist the applications that need to be customized to support the brand and which applications need to be integrated with the portal.
Step Two – Branding. Clearly articulate who you are and what you have to offer. When your key audiences have a better experience interacting with your institution, you build brand equity. A key barrier to this experience—a mistake that typically only institutions of higher learning make—is the practice of promoting vendor and application names ahead of the institution’s, as if those names are more important than the capabilities that are added to the website. If your portal and your website are to be integrated and represent your “ultimate brand statement,” always reinforce the notion that your institution is responsible for streamlining the user experience and creating useful interactions.
Remember, your brand and the effort you put into bringing all your stakeholders together will have a huge impact on your student body. For example, by creating a branded virtual campus through your portal and tailoring applications to the needs of your students, you are creating a sense of community that you can promote in your college brochures targeted to hard-to-engage portions of the student body, such as online education students who will never set foot on campus.
Step 3 – The Cloud and your data. Decide what’s right for you. Are you planning on hosting your applications and data on premises or in the cloud? Can your current solution support unifying your public-facing website with your intranet? If you’re hosting on premises, you should have the ability to customize your applications to reflect your brand. If you’re hosting with a cloud solution provider, you’ll need to work with your provider to tailor and brand those applications so they reflect the look and feel of the rest of your applications.
Further, you must be able to unify your public-facing website and your intranet. Like every other business today, universities and colleges must be data-driven, that is, they must be in the business of collecting and analyzing information in order to better support end users. If your students are accessing one application via your portal, another on your website, and a third on a vendor’s site, you are doing both your institution and your students a disservice. Funnel everyone to your well-branded intranet, and you’ll be able to utilize the portal’s tools to collect and review data on usage, popularity, engagement, feedback, downtime, and much more.
(Next page: Steps 4-6)
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