KWALL
Strategizing Digital Footprint of Universities

“One of the major trends in education today is the wide adoption and upgrade of web content management tools,” begins Kevin Wall, CEO, KWALL. The main driver being the opportunity that these tools present to colleges and universities in helping them grow pools of applicants and pursue their missions. Marcom teams, as well as individual department stakeholders, now have direct control over their web presence. This alleviates the long standing burden IT once held to step in and middle-man content updates. The content management tools available now are very sophisticated, allowing editors to update content and design layouts without the use of any code. “Everything we do is an extension of a sound content management system so that there is a central ‘mission control’ for college and university stakeholders,” he adds. “Committing to open-source is a crucial element to this strategy as it gives us the freedom to extend the CMS into whatever direction we need to go.” adds Wall. “This includes extra layers of roles for groups to allow them to manage their entire team’s content workflow online.”

KWALL crafted web systems feature designs that grow with the needs of education, including meeting accessibility standards. “The best part is, even after clients have “gone live”, they can make improvements across the sites, without costly re-designs or the need to hire an expensive team of developers,” explains Wall. In the process, the company helps clients migrate content from legacy systems to their new websites after carefully reviewing and cleaning the content.

Clients can also benefit from the market research and analysis done by KWALL to develop new ways to engage with customers. Using content personalization technology, KWALL allows organizations to tailor the experience of each audience segment on the website, promoting a more personal interaction leading to increased engagements. Consider a prospective student from out-of-state versus a student from in-state getting uniquely targeted messaging that’s relevant to their needs. This personalized touch helps better connect with a prospective student and drive them to apply.

Everything we do is an extension of a sound content management system so that there is a central ‘mission control’ for college and university stakeholders

Interestingly, the company begins every project with a ‘clean slate’, as Wall says, that helps them focus on a particular use case. Wall believes that this way his team can reimagine and innovate. A testament to this is California State University Long Beach who had tinkered for years with their website, but hadn’t fully committed to a replatform of the core system. KWALL’s experts worked with them to deliver a digital experience that was creative and interesting, but also empowered their marketing teams with tools to keep it fresh and appealing long term. The result was an increase of nearly 10,000 applications the first year after working with KWALL and an elevation in their reputation amongst other universities in the region.

To further achieve new heights in the education space, the company will bring a couple of new launches to its existing portfolio, which includes a solution to enhance the portal experience of students. “We built an open-source framework that harnesses data from disparate campus systems and allow the school to curate the information in a meaningful way,” says Wall. KWALL has also heavily invested in finding solutions for University Libraries and Extended Education. The company is set to launch four such projects this year.