Over the past few months, our team and many other folks from the university, have felt fumigated with “strategy.”

We've had many long conversations that gave us excitement and energy, while other discussions left us with headaches and more questions.

Needless to say, the delivery of the Strategy Document from mStoner was a bright day for us—we hoped it would unlock all the mysteries behind designing and building Bethel’s new site. But once we had the document in hand and spent time looking through it, we discovered that it really held a lot of good stuff that Bethel already knew about itself and its website. mStoner just found a way to put it all together.

The term strategy document is shorthand for a huge number of pages—68, plus a few appendixes—outlining lots of details and big-picture ideas about the project, such as:

• Scope of the project
• Evaluation of our competitors
• Key messages to communicate through the web
• How our webpages will be organized
• Technical updates recommended for Silva (Bethel’s content management) and much more

Rather than having you dig through the entire document searching for gold nuggets of strategy, we’ve pulled out some key areas to share with you.

1) What We Heard From You

mStoner consultants, our friends Doug, Patrick, and Michael, flew from their Chicago office to our St. Paul campus to meet face-to-face with groups from our community.

They also spent hours in follow-up meetings by phone learning all they could about who Bethel is, what makes us distinct, and what our hopes are for the new site.

In What We Heard From You (PDF), mStoner pulls together some big-picture ideas for the project that they heard directly from the Bethel community. Take a look through to see what they found—let us know if you think they’re on track with the three main issues they plan to address.

2) Audience Overview

We know we have tons of people visiting our website and they’re all coming for different reasons. mStoner uses this section to outline who is spending time on our site and the most important things they expect to find.

Scan through their Audience Overview (PDF). Let us know if there's anything major that's missing. What are the most important things you do on Bethel’s site? What audiences do you serve and what are they hoping to find?

3) Key Messages

Beyond meeting with people from all areas of Bethel, mStoner spent time pouring through our publications, webpages, brochures, viewbooks, postcards, and more to discover the core of Bethel. From their research, they uncovered some key messages and themes that tie us together.

This is my favorite part of the strategy—for me, this is the heart of why I’m here doing the work I do.

So take a few a few minutes to read through the Key Messages (PDF). Spend some time reflecting on what Bethel is all about—I hope you come away energized about being a part of this community.

4) Measuring Success

So how will we know if we’re on the right track? How will we know if in the end we’ve got it right?

mStoner outlines some ways for Measuring Success (PDF) along the way, such as testing how students through navigate websites or getting together a focus group to talk about specifics of a design concept.

They also point to some tangible things that we can track once our new site is up and running to give us an idea of how well our new site is received—application numbers, growth in giving, increased website traffic, and more.

To keep you from also becoming saturated with strategy, I’ll wrap this up.

More is on the way as we ease out of this strategy phase and move into phase two. So peruse through this info, pass it on to others, and share your thoughts.