Digital transformation at Birkbeck, University of London

Undergraduate tuition fees had increased in 2012. Overnight, our mature students - faced with dramatic increases in fees - stopped applying. Birkbeck responded by offering full-time undergraduate courses - which were going to appeal to school leavers.

This meant that our website needed to pivot to meet the needs of an entirely new audience. 

What I did

My team and I were given a deadline of 6 months to deliver.  We decided to use this ‘burning platform’ as an opportunity to improve recruitment for all audiences.

I approached this project in 4 stages:

1. Gathering evidence

• Qualitative evidence: I commissioned customer journey mapping research that told us that our website was not fit for purpose. 

• Quantitative evidence: I created a Google Data Studio report to provide insights on how people were currently using our website and where there were potential problems. 

• Content audit: my team and I conducted an analysis of our online presence that showed us our content was really spread out and hard to find. We made it really hard for people to figure out whether they wanted to study at Birkbeck.

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2. Consultation

• Academics: in higher education, academics are powerful internal stakeholders and have the power to block digital developments. My team and I set up open consultation meetings with all of the schools and sent out an open invite to come and talk to us about the project.

• Heads of school: I met with each head of school to get their support and buy-in to the project.

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3. Formal sign-off

I wrote a strategy paper for the project and got it signed off by the senior head of admin.

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4. Project delivery

• DTP working group: I set up a Digital Transformation working group, consisting of school representatives, and consulted with them every two weeks on all aspects of the project. I minuted every meeting and sent round notes from each meeting and asked for sign-off to ensure there was a paper trail in the (inevitable) case of challenges.

• Blogs: my team and I wrote and published blogs to show how we were working in the open.

• Monthly progress reports: I provided monthly progress reports to the head of admin.

• Conversion report: I worked with an agency to provide a monthly analysis of how our website was doing in relation to our key goals.

The results

• We went live with a new homepage, new recruitment material and new student support information exactly to schedule.

• Within 3 months, we saw an increase in conversions across our key performance indicators

• We got the buy-in of our senior management team and our key stakeholder groups, which gave us the approval we needed to tackle the follow-up stages of the project.