ESADE: 7 years working in the digital ecosystem of one of Europe's most prestigious business schools

ESADE is an academic institution founded in Barcelona in 1958, with a business school and a law faculty, campuses in Barcelona, Sant Cugat and Madrid, and an alumni network, ESADE Alumni, bringing together more than 67,000 people across five continents. An organisation with many voices: undergraduate and graduate programmes, executive education, research, entrepreneurship, a very active alumni community, and marketing and communication areas speaking to different audiences in several languages. Our relationship began in 2011 with a small assignment, the school's mobile website, and over seven years it grew to cover a large part of its digital ecosystem.

In 2011, prospective students, students and alumni were already looking for information from their phones, and ESADE didn't have a website built for them. That was the starting point: reaching every audience on the device they used, in three languages.

As the relationship grew, the challenge got bigger. ESADE had dozens of programmes and departments publishing content on their own, on the website and on social media, with no shared model to give them coherence. And the renewal of the corporate website, esade.edu, had turned into a problem: the institution split the project between several providers, and development ended up in the hands of a large technology consultancy that, after almost a year of work and a significant investment, failed to launch anything. ESADE cancelled that contract and needed a website that worked, in a short time, built on an approach that could actually be delivered.

We started with ESADE's mobile website, which we built on Drupal in three languages and launched in April 2012 with a campaign across the campuses themselves. Then we built ESADE Alumni's, in 2013.

In 2013 we won the tender to manage ESADE's social media: first the 14 accounts in the marketing area, then the programmes' accounts, and a few months later the institution's own communication accounts too. For years we ran content for the whole institution, across all its languages and channels, with content plans, day-to-day community management and regular reports. That work also led us to define the institution's content governance model.

When ESADE cancelled the development of esade.edu, at the end of 2015, it commissioned us for the technical architecture and development of the corporate website. We rebuilt it completely on Drupal, integrated with the institution's internal systems, and it was in production in about eight months. The initial concept, the work of another agency, couldn't be executed as planned either, so we also took on the site's conceptualisation and information architecture: the new navigation went live in February 2018, and that same year we built the new homepage with graphic design from an external agency.

On the same foundation we built five microsites for the Communication and Brand areas: Entrepreneurship, Law School, News & Events, Research and Giving. The Research website was published a week ahead of the planned schedule. And for ESADE Alumni we built the landing page and launch campaign for its networking app.