Columbia Business School’s Global Family Enterprise Program (GFEP) had entered a new era. Recently rebranded, they wanted the look and feel of their web presence to reflect the program’s new attitude and newly defined audiences.

We had one website to revamp and another – their magazine – to create from scratch.

We had three months to make it happen.

As Content Strategist, I led the technical aspects of the project.

I worked with the program director and program manager, with the faculty director offering occasional guidance; toward the end of the project, we were joined by a just-hired copywriter. I also briefly pulled in my team’s programmer.

The program director had done the bulk of discovery regarding their targeted audiences, and she and the program manager had, over the years, created a good 80 pages of legacy content for each website. The program manager in particular had many email blasts to convert into usable content for the GFEP magazine site.

The copywriter worked on optimizing key pages for clarity and SEO.

The faculty director provided some copywriting and final approval.

The programmer helped me locate a handful of taxonomy arguments in a time crunch so I could lay out the corresponding page views differently.

• Created how-to documentation
• Completely overhauled and reorganized information architecture on main site, using upgraded (and cuter) content types
• Created information architecture, taxonomy, and navigation on magazine site
• Conducted a content audit, then offered guidance and training on its governance
• Provided some new images
• Incorporated digital accessibility improvements
• Trained program director and program manager on how to update their sites

We met the deadline after managing some emerging fires and blockers. The fresh sites debuted at GFEP’s new Owners’ Day Conference, and all of the feedback that we received was uniformly positive.

Because the sites are so new, and academia moves so slowly, we will need a full year to monitor and completely understand the impact of our work in terms of page views and GFEP newsletter signups. We will be checking the page views and signups every three months in order to monitor. Right now, entering “global family enterprise program” or “gfep columbia” display their main website as #1 on Google SERP. Just entering “gfep” offers nothing relevant – yet. We will check these analytics every three months as well.

My main takeaway from this project was that it was really fun! The four of us found ourselves working very well together, making this project a huge joy, and affirming how easily a project or two can come to life when the vibes are vibing. That work chemistry was what enabled us to move past emerging fires and blockers (such as domain-wide DOS attacks).

My other takeaway was that when it comes to analytics of a product with a very long adoption cycle, benchmarking with established user touchpoints is the way to not get overwhelmed by data. It will be especially interesting to see what happens in terms of page views for GFEP’s magazine website because all of that content is repurposed from a few years’ worth of email newsletters. The program director has open rates from the original email sends, in which the information design was formatted within the constraints of the email platform. I’m excited to follow the web page views when GFEP sends out emails that link to this redesigned and repurposed content.