Education
Sydney Catholic Schools
MarTech transformation: discovery and strategy
About the client
Sydney Catholic Schools (SCS) is the system of 147 Catholic primary and secondary schools operating across the Archdiocese of Sydney, providing more than 70,000 students with a high-quality, low fee Catholic education.
The problem
SCS's IT and marketing and comms teams led an initiative to improve how the organisation uses digital technologies to engage with prospective parents and other stakeholders outside of current students and parents. This focused on the website technologies, looking to evaluate the current platforms and recommend improvements that align with the organisation's educational and operational goals.
SCS tendered for assistance to run a comprehensive discovery process to assess their current platforms, identify inefficiencies, and propose an integrated marketing technology stack with a detailed rollout plan and budget estimate.
They engaged Zuni in collaboration with Sitback, who provided technical website expertise, and Zuni led the primary discovery elements and solution design. The collaborative approach ensured SCS got the very best in terms of independent and impartial advice, technical skills, and discovery expertise.
Discovery process
After initial project kick-off activities, the project turned to stakeholder consultation. Initially scoped as a CMS uplift project, Zuni identified the need to consider the systems and platforms that function alongside SCS's websites. This phase was extensive – Zuni met with 25 different groups, including SCS central teams, school principals and staff, and IT and marketing stakeholders. These workshops focused on understanding the current state systems architecture and identifying the key pain points and requirements from each stakeholder group.
With a better understanding of the systems and their associated pain points, Zuni was able to conduct a current state assessment of the systems architecture in use at SCS.
Zuni then identified a future state functional solution that would address those pain points and requirements. This involved the creation of a unique content management framework to meet SCS's unique franchise-style needs – fed back to the SCS project team for refinement and endorsement.
With the functional solution defined, Zuni began technology and vendor research to evaluate options for SCS to consider. This included CMS or DXP systems, Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS), and CRMs, to create the ideal systems architecture to best suit SCS's needs. Over 20 potential systems were evaluated against a framework developed by the SCS project team – covering functional fit, total cost of ownership, resourcing needs, and sustainability.
Finally, Zuni developed workstream activity recommendations and an implementation plan for SCS to initiate the website uplift.
Research
During the consultative process, prospective parents were identified as a key stakeholder group – with limited quantitative or qualitative data on this user group's experience. SCS engaged Zuni to conduct supplementary research via an online survey.
The primary focus was to understand the prospective parent user experience navigating SCS digital platforms in their school selection, open day registration, and enrolment process – and to probe the potential value of initiating post-open day communications through lead management. The survey also sought actionable feedback on content, structure, and look and feel of SCS websites.
With over 1,000 responses, the results revealed key actionable insights – including high language diversity in respondents, audience segments and insights supporting the business case to procure an enterprise CRM, and invaluable guidance for wireframing the new websites.
Zuni and Sitback's expertise were evident from the outset as they engaged many diverse stakeholders with sensitivity, distilled key requirements and recommendations, and presented us with pertinent advice as we uplift our tech stack. Their strategic approach and impartiality were assets to our technology evaluation, ensuring SCS got the best options throughout the system selection process. Across the entire project, they were adaptive when we needed them to be flexible and proactive when we needed them to anticipate our needs.
The supporting data analysis and research insights will be an invaluable asset to my team's work in the coming years – the commitment to evidence-based decision-making leaves us confident in their recommendations.
Sarah Leaney
Manager, Creative & Studio, Sydney Catholic Schools
Services involved