Challenge:   I am heading the Digital & CRM department in an Education group. Within the group  we have two diﬀerent institutions ( school brands) with 6 diﬀerent campuses around  the world. Both institutions oﬀer a premium education ( Bachelor degrees, Masters,  MBA, Postgraduate degrees) in the enlarged Hospitality Management Education  sector. A majority of our new student recruitments happens via digital channels, our  websites ( one main and local languages versions for each brand) being the central  touchpoint.  We have historically had websites which were developed with a branding  objective in mind, addressing the needs of potential students mainly.

As we have ambitious objectives to grow our number of enrolments, as well as  showcase more our academic excellence, address a more diverse stakeholders base,  and reﬂect the evolution of the positioning of both brands, we have decided to review  our websites content, architecture and designs for each brand to optimise visitors  satisfaction and grow the volume of leads captured.

This project is a key project for the future growth of our institutions and needs to align  all diﬀerent stakeholders ( Group Exec Mgt, Brands exec Mgt, faculty, marketing teams,  brand teams, IT, Digital Marketing) towards the same objective and expected outcome  of the project, whilst making sure we keep the customer ﬁrst approach.

Selection:

To start the project the right way and keep the executive Management in an open  state of mind and not go to conclusions from the ﬁrst workshops, whilst keeping a  customer ﬁrst approach, I decided to use the tool mind mapping in the ﬁrst phase of  the development of this project. I took reference from the video of Lydia Maldonado  from Darden University in the week 3 of the course (https://www.coursera.org/learn/ uva-darden-design-thinking-innovation/lecture/lsFRa/mind-mapping-tool). This phase  of the project, in the What is phase of design thinking process, aims at looking at  pattern and to generate insights for the second phase of this project, which will be the  what if phase, starting to build user scenarios and website architecture. Therefore, for  me, the mind mapping tool was perfect for me to deep dive into the what is phase of  this design thinking exercise.

Application:

We have collected over the last few months a lot of qualitative data about our brands  customer perceptions, how they describe us, what made them choose us. This  important piece of research has informed us to renew our brands positioning. In  parallel, we have worked together with existing students and the marketing teams to  deﬁne diﬀerent personas of potential students for our undergraduate and

postgraduate degrees for both brands. To this data sets come further data about visit  ﬂows, heatmaps, conversion rates, visits demographic origins, channel sources, lead  to enrolment conversion rates taken from our website analytic tool, our marketing  automation solution and our CRM. All these data points are a good base to Digg  further in the what is phase with the management to set the right base to build the  what if phase of the project.  We built an “art gallery” in a very large room of our campus  and asked the executive  Management of the Group, as well as both brands to join for a day of a mind-mapping  workshop. The art gallery was showing in diﬀerent formats all the key elements of the  diﬀerent studies on papers, interview videos were available, as well as videos of  deﬁnition of personas we had created in an earlier workshop.   We started the day by doing two tours in parallel explaining to the present people  which data was collected, what it meant, what we were expected as an outcome to the  workshop. Each tour was brand speciﬁc, with the Exec Management of each brand  being together, and a 50/50 split of the people from the Group level which were  present.   After the tour of the gallery, we asked the people present to take notes on post-it of  what they thought were important elements to write down and share at a later stage.  This stage was done individually and everyone was able to walk freely and gather their  thoughts. After that, we created two groups (one per brand) to create clusters of the  post-it notes they had written down, ﬁnd patterns between them and asking them to  write down the insights which would inform the next stage of the project and the  project members.  This last phase of the day is really tough, as people have been  already long in a room and it is diﬃcult to keep people focused and generate valuable  insights.

Insight:

We thought with the team before the workshop that we would have in our mind most  of the insights already. We were really surprised to see how much richer content and  insights we got from the participants. Having people from the brands participating to  the workshop enriched a lot the speciﬁc view and understanding of the diﬀerent  behaviours and needs of the brand speciﬁc audiences. We managed through this  workshop to align our Management about the goals of the project and what needs it  should answer, although it was at time very diﬃcult to stay in the “what is”.  Also, we  generated more insights due to the very diﬀerent proﬁles present in the workshop   (marketing, operations, Academic, Finance)

Approach:

We made an error to try to tackle the two brands in one workshop as we had a lot of  common research documents which were shared by both brands. The problem of a

single workshop, even if we did separate groups, did not allow us to go deep enough  and separate well enough the What is for each brand future websites needs.

