Asbury University Launches Website to Boost Engagement, Extend the Brand, Inspire Scholars
The Opportunity
For more than 130 years, Asbury University has been recognized and respected for a distinctive commitment to academic excellence and spiritual vitality. Recent years have seen much momentum at Asbury from the combination of increased enrollment, new academic offerings, strategic partnerships, and community engagement initiatives. As a result, the AU enrollment and marketing team recognized a growing need to address several priorities related to the institution’s website.
Asbury’s strategic communications team partnered with 5° Branding for a complete website redesign, content strategy and transition to a cloud-based WordPress hosting service with 24/7 technical support. The new Asbury website needed to accomplish many things, including better conveying the school’s visual brand, campus culture, student experiences, and academic excellence to support ongoing recruitment efforts.
What We Discovered
It had been several years since the Asbury site had undergone a complete rebuild. Like many university sites, this resulted in more than a thousand pages, competing layers of site navigation and inconsistent program information.
Through interviews with internal groups, the 5° team identified specific goals for the new site:
Improve content strategy through consistent, engaging program content
Elevate AU’s academic excellence, unique programs and impressive student outcomes
Improve global navigation and overall site structure
Extend and enhance the visual brand throughout the entire site for a consistent user experience
Leverage the AU team’s strong media library and internal capabilities
This project was also an opportunity to implement key student segment strategies from recent research efforts and to extend current recruitment messaging throughout their site.
A True Partnership
For comprehensive projects such as this, the best results typically stem from strong partnerships. AU’s strategic communication team led all efforts to update photo and video content sitewide. Collaboratively, team members removed, consolidated, or moved several hundred pages to internal sites. Regular communication across faculty and staff channels supported efforts to gather and update content for each of Asbury’s academic programs.
“The 5 Degrees team deeply understood both the mission of Asbury University and the practical needs of today’s prospective students. The new site is visually compelling, mobile-first, and highly intuitive—exactly what we need to engage students and families as they navigate the college search process. The 5 Degrees team brought expertise, creativity, and a true partnership mentality to every step of the process.”
—Jennifer McChord, Vice President of Enrollment & Marketing, Asbury University
Improving User Experience with Recruitment in Mind
The new Asbury.edu site has a page organization and visual flow that authentically reflects the university’s culture. Intuitive paths for key user segments connect prospects with relevant content.
“I expect it to be much easier for prospective students and families to find the information they need,” said Abby Laub, Asbury Director of Strategic Communications. “This improved user experience with the stronger visual aspects of the website will enhance our enrollment and marketing efforts and make our online presence a true reflection of the in-person experience that our students come to know and love.”
The improved user experience and engagement is evident through a year-over-year decrease in reliance on search to access content, decreased bounce rate, and increased average engagement time per active user. Additionally, a higher percentage of the site’s users are returners rather than new users compared to last year’s user breakdown.
Connecting People, Not Users
An important element contributing to making the site more engaging was an intentional effort to integrate the student voice across the site. While this has technological advantages for “user” engagement, it more importantly communicates the unique Asbury community that will welcome the person who is exploring the university via the screen. This was achieved through written but also multimedia content. On the backend, implementation across the site was aided by assigning unique categorization within AU’s larger newsroom.
A Sustainable System
5° understands that a website project doesn’t end on launch day. Care was taken to build stronger internal governance protocols, implement cloud-based hosting, and centralize management of faculty bios and news articles to be efficiently repurposed across the site. These improvements, along with training resources and documentation, equipped the Asbury team for ongoing success.
“5° made it easy for us to ‘own’ this project once they were done,” Laub said, “and their team members were there for any question – big or small.”
Ready to chat about how a partnership with 5° could boost engagement and extend your school’s brand? Let's talk!
