In May 2024, Dartmouth relaunched its alumni and families website, combining 11 different web properties with more than 5,000 pages, into a single central advancement domain. Prior to the relaunch, Dartmouth’s alumni relations and development departments were spread across 11 websites with multiple domains and subdomains. These web properties were deeply fragmented in brand experience, functionality, and design—with poor user experience. Further illuminating this issue, Dartmouth was using a campaign website to funnel nearly all traffic to its giving and storytelling initiatives. Through research with more than 500 community members, we discovered that alumni, family, and friends weren’t engaging online, and they were confused about where they needed to go to make their gift. Internal Dartmouth staff felt their website presence was outdated and they lacked the training to be able to maintain their own content. Nine months after launch, the new alumni and families website has attracted more than 130,000 new users, with organic search as its top driver of traffic with the highest engagement rate of any channel, converted $2.2 million in online giving in the first eight months post-launch with a more streamlined navigation for giving, enabled cross-domain tracking at the individual level with the development of a tagging system, ensuring users are able to access the content they are interested in and receive marketing and communications related to these areas.
From the Judges
This ambitious project consolidated disparate web properties into a unified, user-friendly site. It has a clean design, features smart user experience, and makes strategic use of backend tagging. This is a scalable model for institutions facing digital sprawl.
