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It’s no small task to lead marketing in higher education in 2020. Many customers have shared their incredible stories with our team, and we’re happy some have agreed to share their stories with you.
Established in 1841, York St John University hosts around 6,600 undergraduate and graduate students every year at a beautiful campus in York. Dominic Billington, Head of Marketing and Digital Experience at York St John, was kind enough to take a minute out of his busy schedule to share some of what he’s seen as the pandemic upset existing plans and caused a rapid transition to remote work.
Overnight, staff transitioned to working from home and students moved to remote classes. It was a tremendous undertaking.
In the three days after the national lockdown was announced, we experienced the highest volumes of search traffic ever on our website. Students, faculty, parents and staff were using Funnelback search to find our systems and the support to use them.
“Funnelback was an essential tool in helping staff and students access resources remotely when we transitioned to remote working and teaching.”
To help staff and students find the systems and support they needed, we monitored the search analytics in our Funnelback dashboard every day. This allowed us to create curated results and quick links for remote-work systems, and create synonyms for misspellings and variants (like “virus” or “corvid”) to get users to the right information. By creating these results, we greatly reduced the number of unanswered search queries and helped users quickly get access to key systems.
Searches for remote work, email or accommodation resulted in a special notification at the top of the search results to drive users even more quickly to the most-desired result.
