Digital system for St. Edward High School obituaries

A website redesign and new marketing automation system to facilitate notifying a school's community of deceased alumni.

Project background.

When a St. Edward High School alumnus passes away, the school’s Office of Institutional Advancement works to notify relevant class years. This service is a meaningful opportunity to foster community among graduates and for the school to maintain communication with alumni. When St. Edward receives an alumnus’ obituary, it posts it online and sends an email to their classmates, along with the class years of any immediate relatives. Before this project, the system St. Edward used for this process was archaic and manual.

st. edward high school exterior lit green and gold at night

Services leveraged.

Marketing Technology

Systems Analysis

Web Design

My unique approach.

I needed to devise a digital system to streamline the school’s process to notify alumni without losing the service’s impact on the St. Edward community. The existing system was very time-consuming for staff. Upon receiving an obituary, the Institutional Advancement team would update its database and then copy and paste the obituary text onto a legacy website with no styling; it was one long text file! Afterward, they would copy and paste the obituary text again into Constant Contact and send it to applicable class years. Lastly, they would notify all current faculty and staff via a manual email. If St. Edward received multiple obituaries in a single day (a common occurrence), the team would repeat the process for each obituary individually.

What I executed.

The new system refreshed all three aspects of the previous notification process. A user-friendly and mobile-optimized website replaced the long text file, complete with search and filter functionality to find a specific deceased alumnus. The new website also features a simple form for community members to share obituaries with the school. More impactfully, the new system automates the sending of email notifications!

When the school publishes an obituary on the new website, it selects the applicable class year(s) to notify of the alumnus’ passing. The class years are a custom WordPress taxonomy. Each morning, the Brevo email platform fetches new obituaries via the taxonomy RSS feeds for the class years. The email digest is specific to each graduating class; alumni will only see obituaries applicable to their class, even if the school publishes others on the website.

Curious for a deeper dive into the system? Download my case study, which includes high-level system diagrams!

Image

The impact of my work.

  • A significantly improved interface for users to read obituaries and honor those who passed.
  • The website averages 5,000 visitors monthly, with hundreds of emails sent to the community.

Ready to start your project?

Get Started