Delivering RCSI's digital mission
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) is the world-leading international health sciences university and research institution offering education and training. RCSI wants to do things properly and continually invest in its future. When it comes to delivering a new online presence upon Sitecore, RCSI desired best in class and are investing in digital to help them to realise their strategic goals. They had reached the end point on their existing technology and wanted to move to the next level.
The project and the challenge
The work commenced in May 2017 when Arekibo presented a vision for how we would like to deliver RCSI 'Digital' mission. The project was to redesign, redevelop and consolidate all the various RCSI properties under a single logic structure on an enterprise content management system. The challenge was to make sure that all of the different stakeholders and departments involved through RCSI had the opportunity to share their thoughts and prerequisites, so that their input was fed into the project requirements and deliverables.
Our approach
Our approach involved putting end-users first. RCSI’s digital strategy began with a consultation across both the organisation and representatives from key user segments (students, researchers etc.).
As student recruitment is a critical activity for the university, the initial focus was on providing prospective students with the information they needed to select RCSI as their institution of choice. From that starting point the scope of the programme has expanded with the ultimate goal of managing the entire RCSI digital experience through the Sitecore platform.
RCSI had grown into a global organisation with satellites in the Middle East and Asia accepting students from all over the world. RCSI used the opportunity of moving to a new platform to take a truly global look at what it needed from digital.
In addition, ownership of the platform was a priority for the client. Alongside the technical delivery programme RCSI worked with Arekibo to develop a new digital governance model. This allowed us to optimise the flow of digital content around the organization and create the building blocks for creating and maintain a best-in-class digital experience for all stakeholders.
The result
The project took 3 years to complete and we jointly delivered a full program of work where we essentially became a single team working through an agile process of design, develop and testing. After the first year of work RCSI Dublin, RCSI Bahrain was live. This was followed by the Leadership, Research & Innovation and Surgical Affairs websites. This month RCSI.com, an overall parent site, went live which consolidated all of our previous work. Our long-term partnership with RCSI working on this and other projects has won awards, including the “Digital for good” award at the Spiders in 2019.
Would you like to discuss the possibility of working together to achieve your digital mission get in touch today.