The challenge
The laundry list of content platform requirements
Amélie-Anne went to work finding a solution. “We knew that we were at the end of this era, and we needed to transition to something more interactive. We also knew that eventually, we would have to move to another kind of platform and that PDF was just not an option.”
They also wanted to know which content was more engaging for the alumni — what were they reacting to more? Did they like Q&As or interview-style, or even a simple spotlight piece?
Amélie-Anne definitely knew one thing for sure: “We weren’t willing to compromise the quality of the magazine just to switch to online.”
So she started researching solutions that would allow her team to publish the magazine online. It made sense — they’d be able to cut the costs of producing a physical product, and they would be able to gain the readership insights they so desperately needed.
The research phase was crucial, explains Amélie-Anne. “I was doing research because we have a board of directors, so I needed to actually present the project and make a comparison of different solutions.”
“We knew that we were at the end of this era, and we needed to transition to something more interactive. We also knew that eventually, we would have to move to another kind of platform and that PDF was just not an option.”
Why not just send out a PDF version?
Amélie-Anne’s team was already putting out a PDF version of their magazine, but it was far from ideal. You had to zoom in and out of a page to read, which wasn’t a good experience. And since the magazine was produced for print, there were very small columns that made reading online very difficult.
“And it was just not fun to read a long article,” says Amélie-Anne. “You could scroll through and have a basic idea of what the magazine was like, but not a very in-depth read of the articles. Not to mention that if there was a typo, it was sort of set in stone.”
And finally, there’s the fact that it wasn’t interactive at all. “We have a lot of services that are offered across the university, so sometimes we want to link to other documents, pages, videos, stuff like that, and that was just not something we could do.”
