During intense change for the Munk School, we helped reduce complexity, increase consistency, and achieve broad stakeholder consensus.
The Challenges
When the University of Toronto merged its Global Affairs school with its school of Public Policy and Governance, a new entity was born: the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
It was a match that made sense. Yet it also created a website challenge of immense complexity. Combining the two separate schools meant incorporating dozens of academic sub-units — and getting consensus from a wide array of stakeholders.
Fortunately, Foster Interactive was up to the task.
The new Munk School was experiencing an incredible amount of change…
As if the merger weren’t enough to deal with, the Munk School transitioned between directors — and weathered a global pandemic — over the course of the project. Massive change can derail any organization; the Munk School had more than its fair share.
Hundreds of people had a stake in the site…
We held workshops with 25 senior stakeholder groups representing the needs of Munk faculty and staff with an interest in the site — a number in the hundreds. Fifteen separate content groups were responsible for two of the subsites in particular; the members of these groups needed to be able to do their work unimpeded by the new site, but they also had a wide variety of permissions and restrictions around content creation.
And The Munk School needed to integrate 400+ events a year with their 20-year-old legacy system. (Also, as it turned out, with Zoom.)
An integration of this scale would already have posed a difficult challenge. But then, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic turned the in-person event model upside-down, meaning we had to help Munk pivot on-the-fly from in-person to remote events, and then again from remote to hybrid.
We performed wide-ranging user research to inform every decision we made about the site’s new architecture, then brought the results to stakeholders to win approval and achieve data-backed consensus.
The Solutions
First, we managed diverse stakeholder opinions.
Through the discovery and content phases of the project, we interviewed more than two dozen stakeholder teams, each with differing needs — all with the same passionate interest in how the new website would enable their work.
The only solution for managing that many opinions? Data. We performed wide-ranging user research to inform every decision we made about the site’s new architecture, then brought the results to stakeholders to win approval and achieve data-backed consensus. This extensive user-experience research also led to a better-performing, more user-focused site.
Then we centralized control over content — while improving users’ ability to maintain multiple sites independently.
Munk School staff and faculty — including scholars, thought leaders, and other experts — typically work for several subunits. This meant that a content contributor might need to post (and maintain) content in several separate places.
We helped transition the site to a syndicated model, where new or edited content could automatically be published once and distributed everywhere it needed to be. Centralized content could also promote content from any subsite to the main site, significantly improving efficiency and reducing wasted time.
Ensuring the content strategy continued to work
We also ran content workshops for stakeholders and staff to show them our vision for the site’s content strategy, and to train them how to make that strategy their own after the site was launched.
Through it all, we adapted to change.
The Munk School’s program events calendar averages more than 40 event dates a month, featuring everything from smaller podcast tapings and panel discussions to a virtual meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that attracted the attention of the world.
It was necessary, in other words, to “get events right” — and it was already proving challenging to integrate the new site with the school’s two-decade-old event management system.
Then the pandemic hit.
A quick (and necessary) pivot
Suddenly all those events needed to move online — so the choice was made to integrate with Zoom. At first, this helped Munk embrace online-only events without much downtime; then, as restrictions were lifted, some attendees remained cautious, so they moved to a hybrid online/in-person model.
The Foster Difference
Our project management approach accommodates the pace of change. Because we chunk projects into more adaptable two-week sprints, we’re more easily able to reprioritize our project roadmap if necessary. When, for example, a new director requests a change in design direction — or even when a pandemic upends everyone’s sense of “normal” — Foster can roll with the punches.
Foster Helps the Munk School Shape the Global Conversation
The Munk School is a highly complicated organization, with a diverse group of hundreds of stakeholders — We leveraged user experience research to align those stakeholders as much as possible, making choices that would suit their needs — but without losing sight of the website’s visitors.
We then built a platform that worked not only for the core website management team, but for the nearly two dozen smaller Programs, Centres, Labs and Initiatives that collectively comprise the whole.
Success in the face of extreme change
And over the course of two-and-a-half years — with a worldwide health crisis thrown in for good measure — we successfully built a site that makes it easier for Munk School staff to do their jobs, for their experts to provide comment and context around the world, and for current and prospective students to find what they need on their journey to becoming the next generation of world leaders, policy-makers, and game-changers.