Blue Fountain Media Modernizes John Jay College's Image, Website and Recruitment Efforts Through Comprehensive Digital Rebranding

NEW YORK, Dec. 8, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Known as a preeminent national and international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College, offers students a liberal arts and criminal justice curriculum that balances the sciences, humanities and the arts with professional studies. However, the college's website wasn't doing the school justice due to minimal messaging, confusing navigation and low levels of user-engagement.

To help solve these problems, the college turned to Blue Fountain Media; a digital agency based in New York City, to elevate its brand perception, boost community engagement and improve its student recruitment efforts. Blue Fountain Media has significant experience in the higher education vertical having worked with several other universities and colleges to build their digital brands, including LeMoyne, NYU and The New School.

In recent years, the 50-year old college has invested considerable capital resources to modernize its campus and establish itself as a premier senior college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. However, the project team at Blue Fountain Media learned that perceptions of the school lagged behind reality. This posed a challenge—changing the college's digital brand image to reflect its expanded academic offerings, global reach and new facilities.

"Our team conducted extensive discovery by surveying dozens of John Jay faculty members and hundreds of students, attending alumni events and meeting with the admissions team to help inform our digital plan," said Clare Johnston, Account Director, Blue Fountain Media. "We set out to understand the old website's usage patterns and current students' decision factors when investigating colleges."

Finding that the majority of college-hunting research is conducted online, Blue Fountain Media's John Jay account team knew it needed to completely redesign the website with a more modern look and feel, dynamic social feeds and value-added content, while staying true to the college's new messaging and positioning. To solve these issues, they developed a comprehensive website branding strategy, refined the website's positioning and messaging, identified opportunities for marketing integration and built more streamlined conversion funnels to help prospective students submit applications.

"As the first channel of communication, websites need to deliver clear and concise messaging, while seamlessly guiding visitors through the site," said Ms. Johnston. "John Jay's digital presence needed to mirror its academic expansion and on-campus innovation. We worked closely with the college to develop an effective strategy to grow John Jay's online brand to match the high-quality education that the institution is proud to provide for its students."

The results of Blue Fountain Media's work have been nothing short of dramatic. John Jay College's website metrics related to on-site engagement have seen significant improvements since the new website launch in February of 2015. A year-over-year comparison from February to September, 2014 to the same period in 2015, saw a more than 25 percent increase in page views, with a 53 percent decrease in bounce rates. On the new John Jay website, users visited more pages per session (a 22 percent increase) and stayed on each page longer (a nearly 13 percent increase in average session time).

"For the first time, our website accurately presents John Jay today – as the leading liberal arts academic institution with a focus on justice," said Rama Sudhakar, Chief Communications Officer at John Jay College. "The usability of the site is outstanding and Blue Fountain Media's organization of our website is intuitive."

For more information visit www.bluefountainmedia.com.

Media Contact
Karina Welch 
Blue Fountain Media 
[email protected]
1-212-260-1978

SOURCE Blue Fountain Media

Related Links

http://www.bluefountainmedia.com