The 27th Annual Communicator Awards honors six of mStoner’s clients with five Digital Awards of Excellence and one Digital Award of Distinction.
The Communicator Awards honor excellence in strategic, effective, and meaningful communication across digital, video, podcasts, marketing, mobile, print, and more.
With over 6,000 entries received from across the U.S. and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals.
The mStoner team is excited to share the following results:
Agnes Scott College: Digital Award of Excellence for School/University Website
Core Challenge:
Governance of the site had become a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Various faculty contributors and content managers had created a lack of consistency in the site’s voice and style and the type of information it provided. The team at Agnes Scott knew their website redesign needed a plan for centralized governance and training for designated content managers.
The Results:
Along with a new governance plan, the new site is mobile-friendly, accessibility compliant, fast-loading and optimized for search engines. Navigation has been streamlined and separated by topic, task, and audience; and internal and external information have been separated for a more intuitive user experience.
Visit the website and read the case study.
Iona College: Digital Award of Excellence for School/University Website
Core Challenge:
While Iona’s website was seven years old, some content hadn’t been touched in more than 10 years. The site’s governance rested entirely on the IT department, which had no choice but to approve every change without a marketing or content strategy in place. Iona’s brand identity also looked out-of-date, and its logo was too intricate to be legible in digital media. Nothing on the site reflected Iona’s legacy of opportunity, inclusion, and the liberating power of an Iona education.
The Results:
“Now we have a site that we WANT people to visit. Previously, when site traffic was down, we didn’t always feel like that was such a bad thing,” jokes Mary Clare Reilly, vice president of marketing and communications. Her team’s new oversight of Iona’s web presence has been respected, too. “People know that we’re doing things like usability testing and that we’re willing to consider requests — but that we really must prioritize what is in the best interest of prospective students and admissions.”
Visit the website and read the case study.
University of Pittsburgh at Bradford: Digital Award of Excellence for School/University Website
Core Challenge:
The University of Pittsburgh at Bradford wanted to accomplish two major goals. First, make the website work better for its most important audience: prospective students. Second, showcase what really sets Pitt-Bradford apart.
The Results:
mStoner leveraged Pitt Bradford’s unique, beautiful location and high-impact photography to showcase what set the university apart from others while also making big changes to the site’s functionality. Traffic is up on key pages such as admissions, academics, and program pages. The overall time spent on the site has nearly doubled.
Visit the website and read the case study.
Purdue University Northwest: Digital Award of Excellence for School/University Website
Core Challenge:
PNW formed in 2015 from a merger of two separate Purdue campuses: Purdue Calumet and Purdue North Central. Both campuses had 70 years of history and accomplishment to share on a combined website and PNW also needed to layer a new brand identity atop that complex story. Understandably, the first website that PNW launched was an okay-for-now mashup of 27,000 pages. They knew it suffered from a lot of outdated content, a sprawling information architecture, and an unmanageable back-end — but it would be two more years before the timing was right to fully redesign.
The Results:
PNW’s Director of Web Services James Seidler reports that the strongest success they have seen is the performance of their academic program pages. Traffic to program pages increased 215% over a four-week period (prior to COVID-19). The new site also features a request for information (RFI) form at the very top of each program page, which captures visitors’ interest in the specific program.
Visit the website and read the case study.
Elmhurst University: Digital Award of Excellence for School/University Website
Core Challenge:
The website refresh had three overarching goals. The first: to show off. Elmhurst has experienced record enrollment and fundraising in recent years, as well as increased national recognition. The second goal was to tell a more cohesive story on the homepage to prospective students while continuing to effectively serve multiple audiences. Finally, Elmhurst wanted to elevate its academic programs with a prominent position on the redesigned homepage.
The Results:
Initial results indicate visitors find the content engaging and the site well-organized. New components garner more clicks than the previous version: a 7.5% increase on desktop and a 5% increase on mobile. Heat maps show visitors scroll further down the page than on the previous site. The new header and navigation menu are getting people where they want to go. Click rates have increased on the Apply, Visit, and Request Info links, and traffic has increased significantly to the major navigation sections.
Visit the website and read the case study.
Dakota State University: Digital Award of Distinction for School/University Website
Core Challenge:
DSU unveiled a new visual identity in May 2019. To further its branding efforts, DSU developed a new website to support the new brand and main business goal: to improve the digital experience of prospective undergraduate students considering DSU through strategic insights gained by mapping the customer journey. A secondary goal was to highlight the research and academic strengths of the university and its faculty and leadership.
The Results:
DSU launched a multichannel marketing campaign along with the website to roll out the new brand. “We’re hearing people say they have never seen the amount of marketing that they’ve seen from DSU,” Joelle Johnson, DSU website editor, said. “We’re running digital and out-of-the-box strategies in our campaigns. But no matter how people arrive at the website, they all have a consistent experience with our brand. The site itself is just visually beautiful, and the side navigation and all of the components mStoner created really promote our identity as a university that is moving forward or rising, which is our tagline. We have definitely seen an increase in awareness of who we are and what we offer.”
Visit the website and read the case study.
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.
-
Travis Koury Marketing Manager As marketing manager, Travis Koury shares mStoner’s thought leadership and service offerings across a multitude of channels. He thoughtfully applies digital marketing best practices to ensure higher education marketing and communication professionals can easily discover and access mStoner’s helpful resources, primary research, and on-demand content.