Illinois Institute of Technology »
IIT Gathers Many Voices into One Vision with
Engaging Website
John Anderson, president of the Illinois Institute of Technology has been a man of action from the time of his inauguration in October, 2007 . He has garnered the support of IIT’s Board of Trustees for a university-wide planning process aimed at reestablishing IIT as a major force in higher education. Thus was born the Many Voices, One Vision campaign reflecting IIT’s commitment to engaging and listening to the ideas and concerns of the entire IIT community.
Although he had already invited faculty, staff, students, and trustees to join a steering committee charged with helping IIT determine this future course, he then took the next step to gain the broadest possible involvement – develop a community-based website to continue to solicit the opinions and sustain long term engagement in the planning process.
Duo Consulting was approached with this concept on April 3, 2008. The mission was clear, the path was not. Nevertheless, on April 28, 2008, merely 17 business days later, IIT’s ManyVoices website was launched and promoted to the IIT community.
To achieve this rapid site deployment, Duo selected the Drupal web content management system with its rich native functionality for supporting community-based websites. Having features such as online registration functionality built into the product insured that neither precious time nor scarce money had to be spent on custom development of essential features. Duo worked closely with IIT to insure content requirements, design, usability and information architecture worked in harmony. But the real story is what happened next.
From April 28 to May 7, 2008, relying on intra-school communication, the site attracted 1606 visitors with 660 faculty, staff and students registering and submitting 300 responses to requests for their thoughts on where IIT should focus its energies and resources over the next decade as it seeks to advance into the upper tier of universities. These ideas are being reviewed, analyzed and synthesized by the steering committee. The outcome of this process will be the formation of planning task forces that will take many of these bold and visionary ideas, expand them, and then build plans for their execution.
IIT’s ManyVoices website was conceived as a tool with an explicit goal, what Duo Consulting refers to as a website’s “job description.” By having a grasp of the differences and capabilities of multiple web content management systems Duo was able to choose the one that best accommodated IIT’s needs. And based on Duo’s experience with Drupal, deployment was able to proceed on a radically escalated timeline to meet the needs of the client. Last, clearly-defined metrics are providing project administrators a gauge for evaluating the input provided from diverse segments of the IIT university community.
