

A Scroll team supported UCL to update the quality of content and design throughout their digital estate.
UCL is a large, complex organisation. It has expanded rapidly in recent years by merging with and acquiring other institutions. This means many of its internal systems – digital, administrative and otherwise – are devolved and struggle to integrate as part of a single, homogeneous system. In any given digital project there are many stakeholders with strong and often conflicting needs and opinions.
However, UCL has a strong vision for its future. It nurtures innovation and disruption in its mission to solve some of the world’s biggest problems and develop great minds for the future. But the online prospectus struggles to communicate this vision, and recruiting the best students in the modern world depends on courses being sold accurately and effectively online.
While it works on improving the systems used in content creation and governance, the central digital team UCL needed support in identifying opportunities to improve how the 12 schools and faculties communicate about teaching and research to prospective students. It also required content experts to give advice, support and recommendations at a local level to improve the quality of content as far as current systems will allow.
The work we did was very successful.
UCL is a world-renowned Russell Group university based in London. UCL is working to grow its digital maturity and maintain pace with its competitors to enable it to succeed and thrive in the coming years.
A team of two Scroll content designers embarked on a month-long immersion and discovery period. The aim was to understand the issues at play from as many perspectives as possible before deciding on a bespoke course of action to respond to the challenge as a whole.
We undertook stakeholder research, informally and anonymously interviewing comms and administrative staff from each faculty. We built trust, positioning ourselves as independent but positive agents in the dynamic between central and local parties. We combined this with desk research on UCL, its competitors and the Russell Group student recruitment market, and a content audit of the existing UCL offering.
As the discovery phase was completed, the COVID-19 pandemic brought sweeping changes to the original systems work that had been planned. Our work shifted focus accordingly.
Over the next 12 months, we worked to meet the shifting priorities:
The projects required strong, multidisciplinary content expertise, a curious approach and an agile working style, as well as confident communication skills.
“We engaged Scroll with an ambition to improve our prospectus, but the work their content designers did for us was beyond our expectations. The Scroll team didn’t just deliver high-quality work for our projects, but worked in a way that has lifted standards across the community immeasurably, and left us with reusable assets and processes. For many colleagues who have to supply content as subject, but not channel, experts, it was a lightbulb moment. And that was thanks to the rigor, expertise and care the Scroll team brought to their engagement with us.
Samantha Fanning, Head of Digital, UCL