Emphasizing the Personal in College Choice
Pace University has a long and successful history of helping students get where they want to go. With its individualized “Pace Path” program for undergraduates that pairs course selection with career exploration from day one through graduation, the university is laser focused on turning students’ goals into their realities.
The Challenge
The University’s website wasn’t telling their story in a powerful way. Dated and text-heavy, the site didn’t reflect Pace’s dynamic, student-centric approach. The old website required users to dig too much for information and failed to fulfill its promise of study plans that are tailored to a student’s interests.
The new site design had to arm Pace with tools to meet individual student needs and elevate new branding language while ensuring coherency with future sites developed by the university’s six other schools.
The Solution
We saw an opportunity for a fresh, modular site that highlights the school’s commitment to career outcomes and invites engagement through imagery, stories and personalized messaging.
We demonstrated Pace’s focus on students by developing a Program Matcher tool, which allows students to conduct targeted searches of the university’s offerings based on their interests and career goals. Responsive to student needs, this feature doubles as a way to emphasize the breadth of majors and specializations available at the school.
In addition, we employed our proprietary personalization tool, which connects the new Pace.edu with Slate CRM to support personalized content for students during the application process. This enables the development of personalized experiences for prospective students based on their information in Slate, even when they are not logged in to the system. The Program Matcher will continue to support matriculated students through their years at Pace, customizing messaging about next steps for their academic focus, scholarships and other important steps.
The Result
The new Pace.edu provides multiple layers of customized engagement with prospective and enrolled students. Our modular approach is already allowing the university’s individual schools to develop their own sites with the library of templates and components we developed.
Like the university and its results-focused mission, our student-centric design meets students where they are and invites meaningful engagement while boosting new “go-getter” brand language throughout the university’s digital ecosystem.
Pace needed a new website to support our incredible momentum coming out of the pandemic which would help us speak with clarity to our most important audiences. We on the Pace team had our own expectations, ideas, and branding in place, but needed expert guidance on how to apply this all to a cutting-edge drupal website. The Digital Pulp team provided oodles of vision and inspiration, but also rock-solid work from project-management to design to architecture to development. This may sound like hyperbole but I’ve never been more pleased with the outcome of a web design project.