Redefining Digital Experiences:

In the shifting landscape of higher education, it has become almost untenable for lean teams to manage digital experiences across channels. Today's prospective students are fluent in digital-first interactions: they’re engaging with friends through messaging apps, exploring products and services on social media, and making online purchases through robust ecommerce platforms. In its 2022 Higher Education Digital Experience Report, the U.K.-based digital consultancy Great State found that 50 percent of surveyed students reported that the quality of their university’s digital experience was a key factor in college choice.

And this digital experience is important not just for students. From faculty and administrative staff on campus to the parents of both current and prospective students, that experience is becoming top-of-mind. Running a successful college or university is a reputation business. Every interaction, whether online or in person, has the ability to strengthen or undermine that reputation.

Over the last decade, the complexity of managing these digital experiences has ratcheted up. The need for sustained institutional growth led many universities to expand their online presence piecemeal. The CMS alone was no longer enough. They needed another tool for their student portal. Another tool for their program finder, and so on. For many institutions, that’s led to a disconnected digital ecosystem with no easy way to maintain brand consistency or content governance.

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) are designed to solve the multi-channel problem. A DXP helps universities create, manage and orchestrate a consistent experience across all digital touchpoints in the student journey, from one platform. The issue: not all DXPs go about solving this problem in the same way. Legacy monolith DXPs require users to migrate everything into a single platform - whether or not they need it all - which can be costly and lock you in. Composable DXPs are more flexible offering the ability to mix-and-match capabilities according to your needs. However, many only offer this within the vendor’s own suite of tools.

A truly composable DXP (such as Squiz) gives users the ability to integrate their existing infrastructure with new capabilities, regardless of vendor. Importantly, it then applies a layer of content orchestration and governance across the entire ecosystem from the platform. This enables universities to gain the flexibility to choose the best tools to use from any vendor, without compromising on the visibility and governance over the entire experience from one place.

Finding a Flexible Solution for the University of the Sunshine Coast

The University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC), in Australia, saw remarkable growth over the past 27 years. It started with a single campus of 524 students. Today, the university has five campuses serving over 18,000 students. As they grew, UniSC faced challenges in managing digital experiences and communication across these various campus websites. Their existing digital assets and email campaigns fell short of reaching and engaging students effectively.

To resolve these issues, UniSC needed a way to consolidate communications across all campus websites and student portals while also applying a layer of oversight and governance for their core digital experience team. The solution was building a single, student-centric portal that integrated their existing infrastructure using Squiz’s composable DXP. “The ability to integrate multiple systems into one portal has been a game-changer for us,” according to Tracie Mohr, manager of student experience at UniSC, “bringing it all together into one spot makes life so much easier for our students.”

By connecting their existing services together with Squiz, UniSC improved site speed and search for students across all five campuses and integrated their FAQ database with their core website and site portal. This made it easier for students to independently find the information they needed. It also led to a decrease in the overall number of inquiries on their student experience team. After implementing their DXP, UniSC saw 3,500 new logins within the first three days and over 13,000 students connected to the portal within three months.

Giving the UniSC team the ability to manage assets and communications across multiple different sites, platforms, and tools made it easier to collaborate cross-functionally on branding and content guidelines. This helped Mohr and her team define best practices for new campaigns, ensure consistent messaging, and maintain oversight on all university communications across campuses.

Personalizing the Student Experience at Griffith University

Griffith University used Squiz’s composable DXP to implement a streamlined digital experience for its students. The team wanted to make meaningful changes to their student portal, which lacked key features to achieve Griffith’s ‘North Star’ of making it easier for students to accomplish important tasks on their website.

In preparation for these changes, Griffith performed user experience (UX) research to identify student preferences and create personas for their target audience. They found 23,000 different combinations of preferences based on location, level of study, campus, degree type, and more. Using Squiz’s composable DXP, Griffith updated their website to provide more dynamic personalization based on these preferences and give site visitors the ability to select what content was most relevant for their needs.

This personalization helped them launch a refreshed student portal experience in 2020, which received overwhelmingly positive feedback from their students — saying it increased their sense of “connection” with the university. “The common thread is the strong partnership that we’ve had with Squiz,” according to Trend Belling, portfolio manager at Griffith University. Implementing these changes also helped Griffith lay the groundwork for further student personalization and improved digital experience insights for their team.

Centralizing Communications for a National Top-Ten University

One powerful example of composability’s potential comes from a large university that consistently ranks as a top-ten higher-ed institution. The university has multiple colleges including a business, medical, and engineering school, and each uses a different CMS or DXP to run their respective websites. Distributed decision-making and content management gave each college autonomy over their own communications, but the parent university needed a way to orchestrate this content via a single, centralized location.

Consolidating all three websites using a monolithic DXP would require a costly and time-consuming migration. It would also require a significant amount of work for the university to republish each article on their new site. With Squiz’s truly composable DXP, the university was able to resolve this issue by unifying and publishing from each college’s existing CMS or DXP without the need for migrations or platform changes.

They achieved this by aggregating each of the constituent colleges through Squiz’s IPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) tool and pulling everything into a centralized CMS for governance and oversight. Once the content was reviewed and analyzed, the university could easily publish to their centralized news site without swapping CMS’s or migrating platforms.

Using Squiz, they also included reactive search capabilities that could consolidate articles from across all four of these sites simultaneously, as well as provide their students and faculty with a much simpler digital experience. And the integration worked both ways. The university could publish new content directly to each college’s sites, social media platforms, and mobile apps using an integrated newsfeed component on the college websites. This content orchestration system helped streamline communications across the university and its various colleges, while also minimizing the impact on their student’s digital experience.

Scaling Your Digital Experience Needs to Happen Now

Truly composable DXPs allow universities to pick and choose the platforms and tools that best suit their unique needs and existing technology infrastructure. “Come as you are,” says John-Paul Syriatowicz, executive chairman and Squiz co-founder. “You already have digital experience infrastructure in your organization. And we say you don't need to rip and replace that. You can leverage and extract more value from using our digital experience platform with our composable DXP.”

Implementing these consistent, scalable digital experiences is one of the most important things you can do to future-proof your institution. But this digital transformation isn’t moving forward as quickly as many would like. While institutional leadership sees the need and potential positive impacts of digital transformation, budget and time constraints are a huge blocker. Having a composable DXP like Squiz will help you manage these changes more efficiently without the huge financial costs associated with full-scale platform migration.

Composability also mitigates the risk of providing a poor experience to prospective students. You have the flexibility to select and integrate only the components you need and scale your technology in a way that makes the most sense for your institution. And you can do so quickly, as new innovation enters the market, to ensure your institution’s ability to embrace change and adapt in such a fast-paced landscape.

Composable DXPs empower your team to manage content distribution, streamline communication, and create cohesive digital experiences — all while working with your existing tools and infrastructure. “You can build quickly, integrate with a range of systems without needing to be overly technical,” says Syriatowicz, “and still have the freedom of controlling your digital experience and being able to adapt to change moving forward.”

Understanding True Composability’s Impact On Your Institution

Your institution needs to adapt quickly to new innovation without worrying about how those changes impact your current technology stack, or how much work is required to change everything over. And you need to be able to make these changes without disrupting your digital experience or adding complexity to your existing platform infrastructure. Composability is the solution.

Many old world technologies still only work within their suite — meaning you only have the ability to choose from existing tools within their platform. Squiz's fully composable DXP is vendor-agnostic. You'll have the flexibility to use both new and existing tools. No lock-in. Imagine doing all of this without compromising control or governance for your decentralized organization.

This content was paid for and created by Squiz. The editorial staff of The Chronicle had no role in its preparation. Find out more about paid content.