“This shift represents an investment in our marketing and communication efforts,” Tetlow said. “That work raises Fordham’s profile, connects with our alumni and donors, and most of all, increases our enrollment. Investment in this area will pay dividends across the University.”

For decades, the University’s marketing and communications team has been a department within Development and University Relations, a division that encompasses about 120 professionals who work in fundraising, event planning, and alumni engagement, in addition to marketing and communications. The latter represents nearly a quarter of the division, but it is responsible for a wide range of enterprises, including advertising and marketing, communications and media relations, photography and video, social media, and website management. 

With the creation of a new vice president role, Tetlow has now placed University Marketing and Communications directly in her cabinet, where she can address the team’s needs. The division will be led by Lehmann, formerly the associate vice president for marketing, who has led the University’s marketing operations since 2017. She will serve as the interim vice president while the University conducts a national search led by Lerzan Aksoy, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business and a professor of marketing. In the coming months, the search committee will ask for input from the University community.  

“I am excited to assume this role and thankful to the president for her confidence in our team,” Lehmann said. “We’ve very eager to tell Fordham’s story on a national and international stage.”

Though the marketing and communications functions are equally crucial, said Tetlow, the search for a permanent vice president will focus on someone with more experience in marketing, since this position will have a more direct impact on Fordham’s finances. Lehmann’s counterpart in University Marketing and Communications, Bob Howe, will remain in his current position as associate vice president for communications and special advisor to the president. 

Budget-wise, this position will replace the vice presidency for Lincoln Center. (Frank Simio, the previous vice president for Lincoln Center, plans on retiring on June 30.) 

Tetlow said the new shift will help to enhance Fordham’s reputation, both locally and around the world.

“The remarkable team in Marketing and Communications will continue to grow Fordham’s profile, engage our alumni, and most of all, help us to recruit our best and brightest students,” Tetlow wrote in a Feb. 17 email to the University community. “My hope is this new focus will lift and support their work.” 

On Thursday at approximately 2 a.m. EST, the www.fordham.edu web address will be redirected from the old website to the new one. On campus, the change will be almost immediate, but it may take up to 24 hours before the entire Internet sees Fordham’s new location.

Fordham’s Office of Marketing and Communications oversaw the upgrade, which was supervised by Donna Lehmann, director of online communications. Lehmann and her team began working on the new site in the fall of 2013; their efforts represent the biggest change to Fordham’s web presence in 14 years.

“fordham.edu was overdue for a redesign, reorganization, and an upgrade in management technology,” said Lehmann, whose team rebuilt the website from the ground up. “Starting fresh with a new content management system allowed us to purge outdated content and apply best practices in design and usability.”

“It was also an opportunity to rework our web content so that it better reflects the spirit of Fordham and our community, which is caring, committed to service, and committed to intellectual rigor. This is most evident in the text on the site and in the photography, which captures not only the beauty of our campuses but also of the friendliness of the students here.”

Lehmann said the team also needed to make the site more accessible to mobile devices.

“Mobile traffic is overtaking desktop traffic on fordham.edu (and worldwide). We know that for prospective students, their first experience of a university is on their phones, and obviously we want that to be a good one,” she said.

When the new fordham.edu launches, it will still be a hybrid of old and new. Several sections of the website will be completed and launched separately in the coming months and throughout the spring semester.

All of the old site pages will still be available at a new address: legacy.fordham.edu.

— Janet Sassi

The change—the largest involving the University’s website in 14 years—is being spearheaded by the Office of Marketing and Communications. In September, the office hired Donna Lehmann to take on the newly created position of director of online communications.

The new site aims to solve a problem that is apparent to anyone who has spent a good deal of time on the current site: it has grown enormously large—to at least 16,000 pages—making it difficult to navigate and in need of updating.

Lehmann has been tasked with rebuilding the website from the ground up. She will be assisted by a two-member team who will work with web editors, deans, and department heads to reorganize their sites so they are easier to navigate and to revise web content so it is written in short, scannable chunks.

The blog at http://next.fordham.edu will keep you up-to-date with the website redesign progress and offers information on the process and timeline, how to prepare, and how to participate.
“People want to find information on the web as fast as they can, and they need to be able to skim it quickly to find out if it’s relevant,” said Lehmann, who spent more than a decade doing web management at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

A newly redesigned Fordham.edu home page will both enhance the reputation of the University and aid in student recruitment, she said. “The website is our primary marketing and recruitment tool. We need it to better tell the Fordham story and capture the energy of our students and staff and their remarkable accomplishments.“

It will also be easier to view on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, because it will employ responsive design templates that will adapt to the screen resolution of each user’s device.

The ongoing challenge for the University community will be in maintaining web pages so that content is fresh, relevant, and up-to-date.

“A website is not a house; it is not something you build and move in to,” Lehmann said. “It is more like a garden that will need ongoing attention to remain attractive and useful. It grows and you care for it.”

Jim Kempster, senior director of the Office of Marketing and Communications, said an important goal of the redesign is to increase web usage and to keep users on the site.

“Visitors to Fordham’s site who are looking for more information, or to apply, or to donate, will be better served when we have a website that keeps them engaged,” he said.

Maintenance of the new site will be made easier with the adoption of a new content management system (CMS) said Charles-Henri Sanson, director of the Office of Internet Services in Fordham’s IT department. Sanson is leading the implementation of Jadu, a state-of-the-art CMS, to support the new site.

“Web editors will find making changes to their pages and adding new content in Jadu far simpler and faster than working in our current system, Waves. The technology has come a long way.”

The official site launch is scheduled for the fall of 2014, once the semester is underway. In the meantime, Lehmann is blogging about the transition at next.fordham.edu, where she’ll be sharing a project timeline, project goals, milestones, how to prepare for the new site, and best practices.