Alumni Engagement Microsite

To better serve busy alumni, we built a dedicated microsite that is beautiful, usable, and calibrated. As an added bonus, this curated experience is largely on autopilot, powered by dynamic content feeds from external sources.

The Challenge

McIntire’s dynamic alumni community is a tremendous asset to the school and an important part of its continued success. Like most top-tier business schools, graduates are active community members and professionals, dispersed throughout the world with myriad interests. Recognizing and respecting this, we wanted to create a dedicated alumni experience that would encourage and facilitate active engagement and simplify common transactions.

System Design

A dedicated experience

Historically, alumni-specific content was woven throughout the main McIntire site; there was some earmarked real estate but you were always one click away from an entirely different user journey. Not a great experience. When we shifted our digital footprint to an ecosystem model, alumni engagement was a priority candidate for a dedicated microsite. As with the other microsites in the web ecosystem, the content is managed from within a Drupal CMS and rendered in a statically generated frontend application built with Nuxt.js (a Vue framework.) This microsite approach allows us to create a distinct aesthetic, user flows, and functionality, without spinning up dedicated instances of Drupal.

UI Elements

Section components

With an eye toward ultimate ease-of-use, we created a microsite homepage that offered an entry point to pretty much everything the site had to offer. With this page flow, first time users are able to get a bird’s eye view, while repeat visitors can navigate directly to what they need. We also focused on developing UI components that would reduce friction between A and B, these include: fly-out panels with more information, click-to-fill CTA buttons, and on-site submission forms to replace the “Email your update to xyz….” workflow. The whole thing is visually consistent with both McIntire and the University of Virginia.

System Feature

Cross-pollinated content

A core objective of our web ecosystem model is to continuously improve the content managers’ authoring experience. We’re mindful of that commitment every time we roll out a new microsite, which means we proactively look for opportunities to streamline the process, while still ensuring a delightful experience for end-users. It’s a delicate balance, but someone’s gotta walk it. When we realized that the vast majority of content needed for the site already existed elsewhere, we wired up a robust query builder to dynamically pull in data from a number of other sources: job postings, class notes, relevant school news, upcoming engagement events, past event recaps, and people listings. Of course, there are still some areas with manual entries, but the majority of content runs on autopilot.