Aalto University

Aalto University wanted to renew its core website, and at the same time, rethink what a university website should represent. One major goal was to bring the majority of key audiences, both internal and external, to one communications platform, and to offer a very large pool of content owners and creators the tools to reach those audiences. The project surprised everyone involved in the beginning with its complexity, however the problem was quickly solved by developing a system that allowed the source code to be utilized again in different sub-sites.

Scalability and access to accurate information were core requirements, meaning that the focus quickly shifted to modular thinking. This meant content hubs, component libraries, and integrations into various internal services, such as information archives and research portals, to name a few. Accessibility quickly became an important KPI, due to community and inclusivity being core values of Aalto.

Aalto.fi serves thousands of stakeholders in different positions in the University sphere. The line between “internal” and “external” is particularly thin, and the platform needs to serve everyone’s needs: applicants, the media, students, professors, support staff, and alumni. 

The data related to the site speaks for itself: 250 000 monthly users, 500 000 monthly visitors, and 1,2 million monthly page views. The average visit duration is 3 minutes and 49 seconds, which translates to roughly 1,9 million minutes in total spent at aalto.fi each month.

“For us, that distinction between internal and external audiences is quite interesting, or for example, who are our customers? Is a student a customer? In a way, yes, but they also contribute to creating new knowledge, so in a way they could also be seen as staff. Those lines are very hard to draw, so instead, we like to think of ourselves as a community or an eco-system”, explains Robert Salvén, Head of Digital Experience at Aalto University, Communications Services.