About SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University
1,850
students
995
residents
303,000
outpatient visits
A website is only as successful as the content that goes into it, Modern Campus CMS has aided us in handling that content.
Aaron CormierThe Challenge
SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University is the only academic medical university and university hospital in Brooklyn, New York.
It's a unique institution, which necessitates a unique website. Students and patients visit the site looking for information about courses and treatments respectively. It needs to deliver information from multiple departments to a diverse audience.
However, there were numerous issues with the older version of website. It had over 8,000 pages with no solid organization. What’s more, too many people had editing access. They had previously been using a basic web development tool, but it was not designed to handle such a robust website with such diverse information.
The website had always been sort of this place to plop things. The breaking point was the sheer inability to organize and manage 8,000 pages and hundreds and hundreds of documents.
Aaron CormierWith the aim to take control of the website, Aaron and team looked for a robust content management system (CMS) tailored to their needs.
The Solution & Result
With the goal of eventually redesigning the website and its structure, they took the first step by leveraging Modern Campus CMS to successfully migrate all the existing content. The result was a core team of users with access to a dynamic, imminently usable tool, able to distribute fresh content and improve website management.
A new design and information architecture paired with a robust CMS
They considered several open source solutions and CMSs built specifically for higher education institutions. Downstate zeroed in on Modern Campus CMS because of its ability to manage and organize content at the backend.
When we were hunting around, we looked at Drupal, WordPress, and Hannon Hill Cascade CMS. We chose Modern Campus CMS because we knew our website would work incredibly well with Modern Campus.
Aaron CormierWhen the opportunity to completely redesign the website and its information architecture arrived, they had the perfect tool in place to manage and present new content to a diverse audience. The Content Management System met their needs for a robust and modern platform to keep their website up to date.
An informative, targeted and SEO optimized blog
Multiple departments continue to use the website to publish informative content targeted at prospective students, as well as the Downstate community. And they do so without hampering patients’ website experience.
To expand their tool kit, Downstate decided to leverage the Modern Campus CMS Blog add-on with the website. Users can now visit a blog, filter it by topic, department, or subject—say, College of Medicine or community events—and see the latest posts and information that are out there.
The blog satisfies the needs we have for dealing with unique and specific kinds of content. It gave us a new dynamic solution for sharing content across our institution.
Aaron CormierThese blog posts are SEO-optimized fresh content, which helps increase the volume of qualified organic traffic to the website.
The Future
The Department of Surgery Residency Program and the Office of the President are successfully using the blog. The plan is to get more people and departments on board. With the involvement of the Communications and Marketing Department, website traffic and engagement are expected to increase substantially.
SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University is leveraging the built-in tools available to them in Modern Campus CMS to expand their reach and continue to offer a dynamic web solution to a diverse community. Along with the blog, Melody (a low-code, drag-and-drop website management tool), and other Modern Campus add-ons are in the future as well.
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About Modern Campus
Modern Campus is obsessed with empowering its nearly 2,000 higher education customers to thrive when radical transformation is required to respond to lower student enrollments and revenue, rising costs, crushing student debt, and administrative complexity.
The Modern Campus engagement platform powers solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement and development, conversational text messaging, career pathways, and campus maps and virtual tours. The result: innovative institutions can create a learner-to-earner lifecycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency.
Learn how Modern Campus is leading the modern learner engagement movement at moderncampus.com and follow us on LinkedIn.