A revolutionary crowdsourced college website
The new Purchase College website is live. And we could not be prouder!
Throughout the three-year development process, POSTMKTG has served as an expert consultant for this arts-centric SUNY through strategy, RFP, vendor selection, design and key creative development. Our goal from the start was to empower the in-house team at Purchase College; to help them create a site that exposed and promoted all of the performances, guest lectures, protests, discoveries, publications, food, art, celebrations and other events that erupt daily across this amazing campus.
We had two big reasons why.
First, and most pragmatically, we wanted a site rich in fresh and relevant content, where keywords and all the other things that Google loves are a natural consequence of daily activity. With campus content fully exposed, people seeking a more creative college would always find it, right there on the first page of their search results.
Second, and as importantly, we wanted a site that promoted everything happening at Purchase in all its wonderful naked glory. Our goal was to counter a tendency, common at conservatories, toward siloed educational experiences. Dancers, musicians, actors, artists and the kind of academics attracted to Purchase are sometimes so into their own studies that they miss out on the bigger, broader, interdisciplinary experiences promised by the Purchase tagline, “think wide open.”
POSTMKTG guided the Purchase team toward a collective agreement that the key was to create a site that 1) provided real promotional utility to all the of the campus’ zillion interest groups; 2) exposed (and fully exploited) the campus’ incredible creative energy; and 3) gave real incentive to “the crowd” to create original content while simultaneously providing the tools that organized that content and made sharing it super easy. Knowing all this focused the RFP, helped the college’s executive council appropriate an adequate budget, and gave the in-house team the parameters and aspirational goals they needed to select an appropriate web development partner and carry the project through to completion.
POSTMKTG stayed attached throughout the development process, providing a critical third-party perspective, comments (when called on) and key creative copy to help the site sing at launch.