The Office of Digital Communications collaborated with FIU Nursing's director of development to create a microsite celebrating their program's 50th anniversary.
Our team was contracted to build the microsite and maintain it for a life cycle of about two years. During this time, we have been updating the site as needed to reflect a changing lineup of events, starting with a homecoming tailgate and ending with an award ceremony.
The website is a combination of custom design and existing features. Visitors will find stylized landing pages, a robust searchable interface and custom vertical cards.
Thus far, it has been very successful at spurring engagement, contributing to significant alumni event participation and fundraising from community partners.
Highlighting topical content
Our web designer tailored existing modules on the Home page to showcase rotating content, like a carousel of alumni who contributed to the growth of the nursing program and their communities.
Events also came and went, requiring the site to be updated accordingly. As Save the Dates became invitations and invitations became recaps, our team took full advantage of our template's adaptability to design something that was easily edited to make way for fresh, timely content.
Telling a story with our searchable interface
FIU Nursing's centerpiece was their Alumni Stories project. They collected over 400 testimonials from alumni about their time in the program, with some stories dating back to the 1974 inaugural class. The DigiComm team was tasked with finding a way to display these stories and, more importantly, make them easy to search through.
We exported the stories and created a series of categories to filter them using our Core template's searchable interface feature. Whether FIU Nursing alumni are searching for something specific or just want to browse, they can sort through the hundreds of stories that defined the lives of their fellow classmates.
Promoting engagement with new ideas
The final (and largest) event for FIU Nursing's 50th anniversary lineup is a Jubilee Celebration where they will recognize Distinguished Alumni Award winners. The Awards pages are major highlights, being the product of a collaborative committee formed to commemorate important contributors to the nursing profession.
The DigiComm team needed a page that was functional as a hub for nomination submissions while also capturing the prestige of the award ceremony.
Making use of a custom version of our card grid, we created a landing page with accompanying sub-pages for each award. This provided potential attendees with eye-catching design upfront, while keeping vital award information and nomination forms only one click away.
What's next?
The FIU Nursing 50th anniversary is well on track to living out the rest of its two-year lifespan quite productively. The nursing program's development has surpassed several fundraising benchmarks and expects to continue doing so in the run-up to the Jubilee Celebration.
As for the DigiComm team, we will be gradually publishing more highlight posts to show you what our features look like and the major roles they can play on your own sites. We are always taking advantage of our projects to provide ideas for future Core releases, so please feel free to reach out with ideas of your own that you might have when reading our highlights.