The 25th annual Communicator Awards honors six of mStoner’s clients with three Awards of Excellence and three Awards of Distinction.
With thousands of entries received from across the United States and around the world, the Communicator Awards is one of the largest and most competitive awards programs honoring creative excellence by communications professionals.
The mStoner team is excited to share the following results:
Park University: Award of Excellence for General — School/University
Core Challenge:
Park University Director of Marketing Aimee Patton set a single, clear goal for this website redesign: “Generate inquiries from prospective students.” A simple enough challenge, until you consider that Park serves six separate prospective student audiences from more than 80 countries: undergraduates, graduates, military/veteran students, international students, transfer students, and working professionals. Throw in overlapping interests between these audiences, different degrees within the same field of study, dozens of campus locations on military bases, multiple course formats (online, in-person, and hybrid), and mission-critical content for faculty, staff, alumni, and current students and voilá! It’s a spaghetti bowl! Bon appétit!
The Results:
Patton and the mStoner team met this challenge with their combined knowledge of best practices in creating rich user experiences. We created clean pathways for each type of visitor, an easy-to-use program finder, breezy inquiry forms, a campus exploration tool, eminently clickable calls-to-action, and a number of other customized features designed for Park’s myriad prospective students.
“Now we have a seamless way for people to identify what type of student they are, get quickly off of our homepage and into the funnel, and then get the information they need that’s relevant just to them. The user experience is really thought out and more individualized,”
— Aimee Patton, director of marketing, Park University
Did the new site meet Patton’s goal of increasing inquiries? Absolutely. In fact, the site is generating more inquiries than expected. In a year-over-year comparison of March to February, inquiries from the website increased 17% and applications from the website increased 13%.
Visit the website and read the case study.
University of North Dakota: Award of Excellence for General — School/University
Core Challenge:
UND’s needs were clear: a cohesive, comprehensive site that could serve more than 13,000 students in at least 250 academic programs and a way for its staff to manage all that content. Most important, UND wanted to reach an audience it hadn’t expressly prioritized before — prospective students.
The Result:
In that spirit, mStoner and UND identified three major content strategy goals:
- Infuse every page with a singular UND brand identity.
- Demonstrate UND’s value to prospective students.
- Embrace North Dakota — its location, community, and values.
“There’s a little bit of a marketing slant in the messaging. We tried very hard to differentiate each program, to give a prospective student a reason to want more information about it.”
— Tera Buckley, assistant director of marketing and creative services at University of North Dakota
Buckley reports that UND’s newly recruitment-focused site, with straightforward calls to action, is generating leads — lots of them. “The new site generates leads at 5x the rate of the old site!” she says, celebrating the recruitment marketing success.
And the on-demand, printable PDFs from the new program finder are a hit. Notably:
- In the first two months after launch, almost 900 program PDFs were requested by site visitors.
- In January 2019, a record-setting 11,000 program PDFs were downloaded.
Visit the website and read the case study.
Touro College & University System: Award of Excellence for General — School/University
Core Challenge:
The Touro College & University System needed a website that would create and support a more compelling brand narrative through storytelling. As a continuation of a previous partnership, Touro hired mStoner to improve its website.
The Result:
mStoner built a highly useable website — filled with valuable content — with a cohesive look and feel across the top-level site and the schools through design and universal navigation. Our newest, (and bluest!) site is aesthetically clean and serves a global community of students from all backgrounds.
Three of our clients took home Awards of Distinction for General — School/University:
- Carleton College, Admissions
- Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications
- Texas Woman’s University Library
About the Communicator Awards
Founded by communications professionals more than a decade ago, the Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations, and identity work for print, video, and interactive.
The Communicator Awards are judged and overseen by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA), a more than 600-member organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media.