Adelaide University stands up its digital stack

Adelaide University – the result of a merger of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia – has stood up a new digital stack to underpin student enrolment and engagement.

Head of digital marketing Emily Primavera told Digital Nation that the merged entity “had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to “create something new, with a strong digital technology stack and experience that goes along with that.”

The new university will open its doors to students in 2026.

Primavera said Adelaide University is building its digital experiences on the Adobe Experience Platform, with the aim to “to nurture a prospective student right through to becoming a current student.”

“We have Adobe Experience Manager, which allows us to set a consistent and clear platform and hub for our website [and] our student and staff portals,” she said.

“We also selected premium data platforms as part of the Adobe Experience Platform.

“Looking at the platform, we could see that it had a high quality and advanced CDP [customer data platform] solution that would allow us to pull together and understand our data sources and … audiences in a deep way.”

The team is also using Customer Journey Analytics and Journey Optimizer to send emails and marketing communications to students.

Despite not needing to contend with legacy systems, implementation work still came with its challenges, such as understanding what data points were needed to help the university tap into the international market.

Primavera also noted efforts to understand and leverage existing digital capabilities from the two universities that merged to form Adelaide University.

“It was a puzzle to look at what we had already done, what we wanted to do for Adelaide University, what we wanted to build and potentially any key points we wanted to carry over from the existing [digital] units,” she said.

Meeting student expectations

Designing a cohesive digital experience is a key area for the team as it aims to create strong global positioning establishing Adelaide University as the place to study, Primavera explained.

“We know students have high expectations for a cohesive and natural digital experience.

“We wanted to make sure that we could meet [those expectations.”

Primavera said that having its website and portals on one tech platform enabled a consistent experience to be provided.

The merged university will also take a customer-centric approach through personalisation in its digital offerings.

“We’ve done lots of research from a student perspective, and we kept that front-and-centre when we designed our student experiences,” Primavera said.

“We want to ensure that a student is seeing an experience that’s designed for them.”

‘Massive undertaking’

The size of the project and collaboration required to stand up a new digital stack was a “massive undertaking”, according to Primavera.

The tech-led nature of the project and the parallel efforts to understand the student audience, along with the challenges of coordinating two different teams from separate institutions “that have never worked together before” speaks to the project’s complexity, Primavera said.

The university worked with Deloitte and Adobe on the project.

“To get to a point where we are now able to use our technology to see returns [on investment], to start to do personalisation, [and] to look at how we start converting students [into study], is massive,” she said.

“We’re still building the foundation for our university. We’re still building the digital experience. We’re doing so many different things at once.

“It’s just so impressive to be a part of and see that coming together,” Primavera said.