The 24th annual Communicator Awards honors mStoner, Inc. 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:
Wheaton College: Award of Excellence for General — Education & Features + Award of Excellence for Visual Appeal — Aesthetic
Core Challenge:
Turn wheaton.edu into a highly effective marketing, recruitment, and communication tool that streamlines the user experience, supports conversion goals, and clearly communicates the values of Wheaton’s brand as a leading liberal arts Christian institution.
The Results:
Wheaton wanted to create a site that would allow for iterative development over time, rather than a static site that must be completely redesigned every three to five years. mStoner designed six innovative page layouts composed of several content types that Wheaton can mix and match among pages.
“I’m proud of the design, which has taken our site from looking dated and cramped to looking modern and open. … We have a much larger toolbox of visual ways to display content, all of which work well on mobile devices. We have already been able to repurpose one of our page layouts that was originally developed for our ‘Centers’ landing page and use it for the ‘Life at Wheaton’ landing page by tweaking some of the content types to make them work for slightly different content and audiences.”
— Rebecca Larson, Director of Web Communications, Wheaton College
With mStoner’s help, the college also successfully standardized content on its academic program pages to answer questions such as, “Why study this field at Wheaton?” and “What do Wheaton alumni from this program do today?” In addition, mStoner created an interactive program finder to help prospects see the breadth of programs and compare and contrast them easily.
As a result of the redesign, prospective students and parents encounter more student stories throughout the site and find what they are looking for via reorganized content and navigation, and clearer calls to action. Wheaton itself also benefits from having a strong business tool that contributes to increases in lead generation and conversions.
“mStoner jumped in full force. They came to campus and interviewed key stakeholders, held focus groups, and listened carefully to find out who we are and what we’re all about. I’d say this was the most valuable part of the process because from this [intake], the mStoner design team was armed with plenty of information to build templates that clearly reflected our identity and goals.”
— Rebecca Larson, Director of Web Communications, Wheaton College
Check out Wheaton’s beautiful site, launched in September 2017. Early results are promising, with increases in average session duration and pages per session, and an 11 percent decrease in bounce rate.
Johnson & Wales University: Award of Excellence for General — School/University
Core Challenge:
Johnson & Wales University was in a bind: It was launching a brand awareness campaign, complete with broadcast ads and billboards, within a matter of months — but updating the university’s dated, nonresponsive website from 2002 would require at least a year.
The Result:
A collaborative team within Johnson & Wales agreed on a risky but brilliant solution: launch a smaller site with the proper brand presentation on an extremely aggressive schedule, then rebuild the entire site afterward in a more relaxed time frame. The team then searched for a partner who offered creative and technical expertise, as well as the capacity to deliver on such a short timeline.
mStoner stepped up to the plate, working with (former) Director of Digital Communications Cameron Watson and the rest of the Johnson & Wales team to triage the priorities for the site, manage stakeholders’ expectations, and create a schedule everyone could stick to.
“We went into this knowing it would be a real bear. It was going to require total commitment and focus. Being completely honest with ourselves and our team was absolutely critical, and the fact that mStoner was a real team player was essential.”
— Cameron Watson, Former Director of Digital Communications, Johnson & Wales University
The new information architecture (IA) focuses on the journey prospective students make when deciding to apply. Data showed that after landing on the homepage, most visitors clicked through to one of Johnson & Wales’ four campuses, in Providence, R.I.; Miami; Denver; or Charlotte, N.C. The new homepage design features these locations so visitors can now explore them from the homepage without leaving the main site.
Professional photography from the brand campaign creates a strong visual impact for visitors. And employing microcontent, such as one of the campaign’s messages — “Experience. Success.” — gives visitors a quick brand impression that reflects and reinforces the larger campaign strategy.
Colburn School: Award of Distinction for General — School/University
Core Challenge:
Attract new students with a mobile-optimized website that performs as brilliantly as the students and faculty of a world-renowned music and dance school.
The Result:
mStoner’s research yielded insights about why some right-fit prospective students weren’t considering Colburn. In response, mStoner’s design divided the homepage and navigation into two “gateways”: one for music and one for dance. This also created some brand awareness for the school’s dance program; Colburn’s audience previously knew the school almost exclusively for its music program. mStoner also added a prominent call-to-action link in the top navigation menu to an “Enroll or Apply” page.
Six months after launching, the new site is already influencing enrollment. Prospects are visiting the new “Enroll or Apply” page, clicking on calls to action, and spending 45 percent more time on the website.
With a bold, modern design and a best-practice information architecture — plus a content strategy built upon user data — Colburn can finally showcase the visual beauty of its dazzlingly gifted students and faculty. The site’s responsive design also collapses elegantly for any device, allowing the communications team to promote colburnschool.edu with pride.
Mills College: Award of Distinction for General — School/University
Core Challenge:
Create a forward-thinking website that welcomes prospective students with a simple, high-quality user experience and strong visual storytelling.
The Results:
From developing new ways to make a mobile site interactive to looking far beyond higher education for design inspiration, the mStoner team delivered a best-in-class web presence to Mills.
“mStoner was a true partner in the website development process from beginning to end,” said Judy Silva, associate vice president of marketing. “And we’re working with them now for our next phase of development. Their entire team excelled at client service and creative problem-solving. What was really out of the ordinary was that we worked with the company’s leadership throughout the entire process, and they were genuinely invested in our organization’s challenges and long-term success.”
St. John Fisher College: Award of Distinction for General — School/University
Core Challenge:
Translate the magic of a campus culture to every screen and showcase an impressive array of academic programs to attract prospective students.
The Results:
St. John Fisher College wanted SJFC.edu to reflect how inspiring it is to walk on its beautiful campus and see the obvious pride students take in their school. They also needed a mobile-ready, responsive site design to engage the increasing number of prospective students browsing colleges on small devices.
To translate the feeling of Fisher’s campus, mStoner’s creative team focused on authentic storytelling and points of pride by creating “Experience Fisher,” a site section that provides a rich, dynamic invitation to explore the college. mStoner also provided the Fisher team with recommendations for how to manage updates to the site content, make the most of their new CMS, and keep the site clean and consistent-looking. The new site is already creating better word-of-mouth publicity and strong numbers of natural brand ambassadors.
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.