Advancement crosses organizational boundaries to better serve audience
The redesigned MyIU.org portal brings visual cohesion to a singular domain created by multiple systems.
Problem
Two organizations that shared an audience and had similar goals publish different digital sites.
Solution
Create a single place where the audience can find what it is looking for and discover other things it didn’t realize it needed.
Backstory
The Indiana University Foundation (IUF) and the Indiana University Alumni Association (IUAA) have long histories of delivering online engagement and donation management for alumni and friends of the university. The organizations began collaborating on developing sites with similar functions. For example, they created a site for managing online giving and membership transactions and another for editorial content for multiple advancement organizations. Despite the collaboration, the audience still had to navigate multiple sites.
The IUF mobilized the advancement organizations to rebuild online giving using Salesforce Commerce Cloud (in partnership with implementation partner Cloud for Good). Kelly led IUAA’s marketing team, and seized the opportunity to bring other sites into MyIU.org. This gave everything a coordinated look and feel, creating a true, singular digital portal for end users.
Objective
Design and build a single, multi-functional portal that includes giving, alumni resources, event registration, and editorial content.
Approach
While the larger advancement organization was moving online giving into Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Kelly led a design effort to bring event registration, alumni resources, editorial, and other sites into MyIU.org.
Using visual cues from Indiana University’s digital interface design system, her team designed several key screens, including section fronts, index pages, log-in screens, and other universal functionalities that needed to coordinate across the site. The team then conducted rapid prototype tests with users to see if the implementation of the functionality made sense and whether users could navigate through the various systems. Final designs were based on user feedback and ignored organizational boundaries and assumptions.
Results
The result is a single domain for advancement audiences to engage with the university and conduct business.
Within the first year, the advancement organization observed several broad wins:
The My IU home page, which was updated to encourage users to click through, experienced increases in event follow-through and engagement time.
Online giving metrics improved in direct response to the Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation.
Traffic and engagement time increased in the editorial section, and traffic to Alumni Resources increased.