Getting staff buy-in

At Birkbeck, University of London, our internal stakeholders - the academics - were powerful and able to block our work. When we needed to redevelop the Birkbeck website, I knew their buy-in was critical.

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What I did

• Evidence: we conducted a comprehensive audit of the Birkbeck website, complemented by detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis.

• Consultation: we held open meetings with each school, to which all staff were invited, where we talked about the objectives and presented the evidence we had compiled. The most compelling of this was the videos we presented of live users talking about their experience of using the website.

• Agile working: I set up a DTP working group, comprising representatives from each school, who were there to represent their colleagues. We created a detailed work plan, with 2-week sprints and regular publishing stages, which we took to the DTP working group to address questions and concerns. We published regular blogs relating to the stages of development, so that the whole community knew what we were doing.

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The results

• We redeveloped the home page, the navigation, the structure and key parts of the student recruitment journey - to schedule.

• We were able to show that the website improved our KPIs - with particular improvement in Open Evening attendance (which was the key recruitment event that academics attended).

• Our academic community gave us good feedback and asked to work with us on future projects.