Web Strategy & Operations Team Handbook

Quick links

Meet the Team
Introduction to Web Production Responsibilities
Processes
Helpful Links

Meet the Team

You can see a complete Org Chart of the company/team by going to Workday, searching for a name, and then clicking “Team”. From there, you’ll be able to scroll up and down to see who the person reports to, and who reports to them. Below you will find a breakdown specifically of the Web Strategy & Operations team:

Drew Marko, Senior Director, Web Strategy & Operations
Location: New Jersey, USA

Alisha Kassam, Web Strategist
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Mary Adams, Web Strategist
Location: New Jersey, USA

Kaileigh Witczak, Web Production Manager
Location: Ohio, USA

Nicolaas “Nick” Hendrickse, Senior Producer
Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Anitta Jara, Web Producer II
Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Eleni Speal, Web Producer II
Location: New York, USA

Sarah Manning, Web Producer II
Location: New York, USA

Jonathan “Tyler” Dieterich, Web Producer I
Location: Colorado, USA

Edyta Juda, Web Producer I
Location: New Jersey, USA

Introduction to Web Production Responsibilities

What does the Web Production team do?

The team works with multiple internal stakeholders to create and maintain 2U-powered program websites, paid landing pages and minisites. In doing so, there are a few main tools we use to maintain the websites and the content within them. Note: The team also began edX work in Q4 2022, and will begin to support exec. ed. in Q2 2023 and boot camps in Q3 2023. Please bookmark this Content Publishing Owner Breakdown for added clarity on who does what.

Tool	Purpose	Definition
WordPress	CMS Solution to Support Content Production Across Most Lines of Business	WordPress is the current CMS used to create and update legacy 2U organic marketing sites. We have one main WordPress environment for our program websites, but we also have specific WordPress environments for certain minisites. Different versions of WordPress are also used to support legacy boot camps and legacy executive education offerings.
Taxi	Lead Forms	Taxi is used to create lead forms, which are featured across program sites for prospective students to fill out a form to show their interest and find out more information about a program. Taxi integration is currently being expanded to support all 2U-owned brands and lines of business.
Contentful	edX Platform Publishing Solution	Leveraged to support many edX page types including, but not limited to, About (Degrees, Boot Camps), Subject/Topic (Learn, SubCat), Blog (Post Migration), FLEX, and Product Landing Pages (PLPs including Boot Camps, Exec. Ed., Prof. Cert., MicroBachelor’s, Bachelor’s, MicroMaster’s, XSeries).
Compose	Compose is an app from Contentful, which takes a page-centric approach to content creation and editing on edX.	Compose is super user-friendly, and is leveraged to support certain Contentful page types within edX. Page types include, but may not be limited to, About (Degrees, Boot Camps), Blog (Post Migration) and FLEX. Note: All Compose pages may be programmed via Contentful, but not all Contentful pages may be programmed via Compose without prior configuration.
Disco	Also known as Discovery and Django Admin	Utilized before certain page types may be launched via Contentful. Such page types include About Pages (Boot Camps, Executive Education, Degree, Programs) and FLEX pages. Leveraged for back-end catalog work (e.g., UUIDs, slugs/URLs, Indexed Text).
Bodega	Old Paid Landing Pages (PLPs) CMS	Bodega is a deprecated CMS that was used for static landing pages in prospecting campaigns, such as ones we ran on Google, Facebook and Instagram. We transitioned PLPs from Bodega and to WordPress as part of a major 2022 migration effort. tool. These pages can be seen at requestinfo.<schooldomain>.edu
CASK	Old Program Website CMS	Cask is a deprecated CMS used to create and update organic marketing sites. Over the course of 2021, the web production team migrated sites from CASK over to WordPress. As of 4/14/2022, we are officially off CASK.

What is the difference between a Program Website and a Minisite?

Program websites contain program information for a specific University. Minisites are not tied to a specific University, and contain information about 2U-powered programs. Minisites promote partner programs indirectly, typically through ad placements, while .edu sites promote partner programs directly.

Who are the main stakeholders we work with on a regular basis?

Note this is a work in progress and evolved from our legacy 2U structure. That said, we continue to work more closely with partners from across edX, boot camps and executive education.

Marketing Operations
- Senior Leadership – Rakhi Arndt
- Develop, execute, and oversee a data-driven marketing strategy in collaboration with other teams to drive enrollment growth for each program, including prospect acquisition and funnel conversion. Engage with key internal marketing stakeholders to ensure all digital web properties and acquisition objectives in both paid and organic channels are continually being met.
- Led by Lindsey Nguyen, Elvis Gomez & Ricky Ocampo (excluding Launches)
- Launches led by Alaina Mastrippolito & Ali Milloy
A detailed breakdown of who manages what request type may be found on the Content Publishing Owner Breakdown
Marketing Tech (MKTGTECH)
- Senior Leadership – Blair Gardner
- The marketing tech team is responsible for the back-end integration and continuous updating of WordPress. We work closely with this team to ask for enhancements or fixes to the WordPress tool. Marketing Tech works with an outside company called Big Bite to code these enhancements.
  - Led by Brittany Bisceglia
- Google Tag Manager/Optimizely/Setting up Tests on the site
  - Led by Havva Ozbek & Melissa Costa
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Organic Marketing
- Senior Leadership: Sneh Naik
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  - We provide guidance and strategy to drive school ecosystem traffic; communicate integration requirements for link recommendations, school-side landing pages, and other optimization suggestions; support school partners with ad-hoc website analysis, reporting, and consulting.
    - Led by Carly Belloff & Ilhaam Ismail
- Organic Demand Generation (ODG) for Minisites
  - The organic demand gen team’s main focus is to own more “real estate” in the organic search space by ranking for non-branded search terms (ie, online MSW programs) with our minisites (Teach.com, OnlineMSWPrograms.com, MastersInDataScience.org, and more) in order to generate prospects.
  - Brand changes, Launches or Sunsets to Minisites
    - Led by Syrenna Makar
- Organic Content Marketing for SEO
  - Organic Content Marketing’s role is to develop, implement, and evolve a fast-paced content marketing strategy to support top-line company goals and department priorities while reimagining and optimizing team processes that increase ROI, efficiency, and impact of content created to drive organic growth.
    - Led by Colleen O’Day
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Senior Leadership: James Dressing
- Note: CRO is a currently a dispersed team embedded across the organization reporting into various VPs
- Web Analytics: Monitors traffic to all of 2U web properties including sessions, conversions, trends from different sources, and ensures sites have healthy traffic flow and conversion across channels. (May be dated intel, need to confirm the best source for web analytics in Q2 2023 across all LOBs and brands.)
- CRO: Tests new assets or user experiences to improve conversion rate for organic sites and paid landing pages. Make sure the sites are converting well.
  - Led by Niki Zelle (2U Legacy Degree Programs, Minisites & Boot Camps)
  - Led by Marco Bester (edX as part of the Iteration Squad)
Consumer Brand Strategy
- Senior Leadership: Lauren Freundlich
- Content Marketing (CMKTG)
- One key function of the team is to design all of the content that goes on partner program marketing site blogs. Everything created is for the purpose of the digital PR (DPR) team to distribute and promote content to increase search rankings. Content types include infographics, data visualizations, websites, videos/animations, illustrations, etc.
  - Led by Julie Potyraj
Creative Marketing Group (CMG)
- Senior Leadership: Courtney Lausch
- The 2U Creative Marketing Group consists of a staff of designers, writers, multimedia specialists, and production artists who are responsible for creating and overseeing all of the marketing collateral and blog content for 2U programs. We also assist with creating materials for different departments within 2U.
  - Key Leads:
    - Betsy Plowman, Sr. Creative Director (CMG)
    - Mary Ingwersen, Director (Creative Services)
    - Phil Chairez, Sr. Manager (Design Systems)
    - Joe Rendeiro, Sr. Manager (Content)
    - Victoria Cofrancesco, Manager (Creative Services)
    - Jennifer Harris, Manager (Creative Operations)
More stakeholders and areas of expertise to come – particularly across edX – but also boot camps and executive education. And please note that structures, titles, departments and roles continue to rapidly evolve to serve the business.

Processes

Weekly Web Production Sprints

The web production team manages and completes their tickets within weekly sprints. You can find a thorough explanation into why we use this process on the Ticket Submission Page. You can also visit our Jira Sprint Board. Any ticket you see in the top right of the dashboard within the teal/blue section is up for grabs!

Story Points

Each ticket a web producer works on has an assigned story point to understand how difficult and time-consuming a task is to complete. Story points also help keep track of individual and team bandwidth. You can find a defined list of types of updates and their story points on the Ticket Submission Page. Currently within Jira tickets, we use the “Story Point” field to capture the story point.

General Ticketing Process

Stakeholders who would like to make updates to a website page that we manage have to submit a MKTGWEBOPS Jira ticket in order for our team to make those updates. These tickets should contain all relevant information that we need in order to execute the request on our websites.