Building Your Strategy

Discovery is achieved by a team of people who possess a range of skills and expertise. This team collaborates to gather the information necessary for creating a framework for decision making.

Your Discovery team should include these key roles:

• Strategist: An influential member of the department who understands the overall needs of the university. This representative will work to build consensus among team members on the key objectives, messages and target audience. The strategist guides the stakeholder selection process and reviews the interviews for common themes or problems that need to be discussed, resolved or affirmed as a group.
• Stakeholders: Can be part of the unit or directly impacted by the performance of the website. Stakeholder interviews will help you establish your site objectives and core messages. Interviews of your stakenolders provide the basis for your strategy, or mission statement.
  
  • Note: users of the website are your customers, not your stakeholders and can be evaluated for audience needs.
    
• Interviewer: This individual is a critical thinker and a skillful, accurate listener who facilitates stakeholder interviews.
• Researcher: This person visits other universities’ websites to identify ways in which your peers in higher education are using their sites to implement key messagNotees.

In this course you will learn how to how to create strategic objectives for your website that support your business needs, as well as those of your audience

You’ll benefit by learning:

• the discovery process and skills required of each member of the project team
• how to check out the your competition’s website
• how to develop your website’s business case
• new ways that you should be thinking about your audience(s)

This is no "right" way to build a business case. Whatever works for your unit and your site is the right approach. However, that said, there are several key areas of thought you do want to include in order to ensure you are informing the building blocks of a website that works in the way you need it to.

Business strategies can be created at the Unit level, with individual sites/departments in their business strategy referencing the unit strategy and detailing points specific to their department OR each site can do an individual business strategy. The approach is up to the Unit Web Leader (UWL) of the unit.

At minimum consider articulating:

• Business Goals and Organizational Context
• Website Objectives
• Key Messages
• Target Audience Prioritization and Desired Outcomes
• Team, Timeline and Process

If you have the time and resources we suggest also:

• Audience Matrix (Most powerful resource you can add)
• Stakeholder Consuiltations
• Peer Institution Website Best Practice Review
  

Included in our resources are 2 templates, you can use them or utilize a format that makes sense for your unit, as well as a link to request sample busienss strategies.

Please note that business strategies are:

• required for all Collaborative and Guided Support Tier sites.
  
• encouraged for all Self Guided Tier sites.

With your Discovery team in place, you now can proceed through the five steps that will help you identify your department’s strategic needs—the whole purpose for your new website. These key points will help you stay focused on what’s important.

• Listening: Interview the stakeholders within your department, asking them about the organization’s goals, competitors and strengths. You also should question stakeholders on what the website should accomplish, what improvements could be made to the current site, and why they like certain sites from the competition.
• Extracting Objectives and Core Messages: Review your interviews to identify common themes and areas of disconnect. Prepare the proposed strategic objectives and core messages for review and discussion.
• Target Audience Prioritization: In identifying your main audience, don’t focus on labels (prospective students, faculty, alumni, etc.). Instead, concentrate on your site visitors’ motivation—what information are they coming to your site for?
• Building Consensus: Compile the information you’ve gathered into a report that reflects what you have learned about your objectives, key messages and identification of your target audience. Here are a few pointers on drafting your report:
  • Keep it simple; use bullet points to highlight key points.
  • Be sure to include areas of concern you wish to focus on, core messages to position on the site, your target audience, desired outcomes (what you want your new website to achieve) and an appendix listing the stakeholders.
  • You can add more detail to your report by including notes on best practices from peer institutions and an analysis of your current website. Refer to the attachments section for an example of a detailed report.
• Finalizing your Outcomes: Compile a set of written results to share with leadership, stakeholders and the project team. This document, or “white paper,” will inform all decisions you make about your website going forward.
  

Following these steps doesn’t have to be an onerous process. By seeing that everyone within your department is on the same page, you can be sure that your new website will have a sharp focus, one that will make it useful to your visitors, while providing your organization with the outcomes it seeks.

Think of it as mapping out the route to your family vacation destination: You know where you want to end up; all you have to do is perform the research and draw up the best route that will get you there. That’s the process of Discovery.