What You Need to Know

• The University of Technology Sydney has transformed its website from a fragmented, 1,000-editor sprawl into a streamlined, editorial-led platform driven by 80 trained digital champions and a four-tier governance model.
• The digital redesign reshaped, not just reflected, the UTS brand, directly informing its broader brand strategy and creative campaigns.
• UTS saw jumps in global rankings and significant year-on-year increases in web metrics, including new users, time on site, and page views.
• The new platform centralises content creation and distribution, enabling faster campaign execution and consistent narrative control across touchpoints.
• The Uni is migrating to Optimizely’s DXP with plans for full omnichannel personalisation powered by a future Customer Data Platform (CDP) and AI collaboration across university departments.
• UTS’s approach tightly aligns governance, martech, and brand, setting a sector-leading benchmark and proving that digital transformation can be more than buzzwords.

Following an ambitious digital transformation, the University of Technology Sydney has turned its sprawling, thousand-editor sprawl into a streamlined storytelling engine, shifting from an information dump to a centralised, brand-led platform. The kicker? It didn’t just reflect the brand, it reshaped it, inspiring a new campaign and laying the foundation for AI-driven, personalised engagement across channels.

When Tracy Chalk arrived at the University of Technology Sydney in 2022, she found a digital ecosystem that resembled a committee-designed labyrinth. Around 1,000 staff had access to update the university’s website. That meant a sprawling, fragmented patchwork of content had evolved in silos, reflecting internal structures rather than the needs of users.

Fast-forward two years, and UTS has executed ambitious digital transformation, flipping its website from a static information repository into a dynamic, editorial-led storytelling platform.

“What we really needed to do was to think about it more as a brand experience,” Chalk said, “and to think about it in terms of building the narrative for the university, enabling our storytelling and delivering the right information at the right time on that journey.”

According to Cale Maxwell, CEO, LEVO, the partner on the project, UTS wanted a digital presence that matched its ambition and innovation. "Our goal was to create something that felt intuitive, accessible, and adaptable. A platform built not only to serve the needs of today but to grow and evolve alongside the university."

Rising engagement

That rethink now underpins UTS’s broader marketing and brand strategy, which is paying off. UTS jumped a spot in global rankings, and saw significant year-on-year lifts across key web engagement metrics including new users, time on site, and page views.

“We were really surprised by how quickly the SEO sort of kicked in, and we started to see some of those positive metrics coming through. Because you kind of hold your breath a little bit to wait for the system to kick in,” Chalk said.

The governance overhaul that enabled UTS’s transformation is as impressive as the tech stack behind it. From 1,000 decentralised editors, the university has streamlined to 80 trained “digital champions” and implemented a four-tier change approval system.

“Now what we've got is through the governance model, what we're calling the Digital Presence Centre… We have four tiers of changes,” Chalk said. “Tiers one and two are quite strategic or require substantial consideration. They are considered by a board or chair. Tiers three and four can be actioned by 80 Digital Champions across the university who have been fully trained and who can ensure that we've got speed to market for factual updates, or [can action] new content that needs to be added.”

Strategic changes go through a governance board chaired by Chalk, while day-to-day updates are handled by trained contributors within clearly defined guidelines.

“We now control it. I am accountable as a CMO for the site. My centre of expertise are the custodians, and we work to the business needs of the stakeholders,” she said. “So that’s been fantastic.”

And it needed to be. “On the old site, there were 30 different ways to apply to the university,” Chalk said. “Every single one of those 30 different ways was there for a legitimate business reason... So having to discuss and negotiate with each of those 30 owners… to consolidate down into three or four takes time.”

Digital Transformation as Brand Strategy

The redesign didn’t just express the UTS brand, it shaped it, which was something Chalk said was a new experience.

“It was when we were doing the work of enhancing the brand experience through our digital presence [that] we identified some gaps in our brand platform and in our brand positioning,” Chalk said. “The work that was done to bring the brand experience to where we want it to be through the website influenced what we've done in our brand and our creative campaign work.”

“Usually it’s the other way around,” she added. “That was really exciting for me.”

Working with creative agency The Core Agency and tech strategy and implementation partner Levo, UTS leaned heavily into storytelling.

“We wanted to take a storytelling approach to showing people what the university experience was like,” Chalk explained. “So many times we tell people that we've done all of these things. But so what does that mean?”

The goal, she said, "was to make sure that we had, we gave ourselves the platform. We needed to improve the capacity of storytelling, to have consolidation of that into a single location, and then to syndicate those stories throughout the site.”

And it’s helped move faster on campaigns.

“We didn't have to go out and do 10 different campaign landing pages when we wanted to do a new campaign. We really did want to just drive people into the right location on the website.”

Scaling the Martech Mountain

While much of the heavy lifting is done, overhauling information architecture, consolidating CMS platforms, rewriting hundreds of course pages, and centralising governance, Chalk is clear: “This is just the starting line.”

The next phase includes full transition to Optimizely’s DXP, activating personalisation, and eventually integrating a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to power omnichannel experiences.

“We’ve set an ambitious target, 70 per cent onto Optimizely in the first year, and then 100 per cent the year after,” said Chalk. “Many universities take many years to do that.”

“We do want to capitalise on the personalisation capability of Optimizely in the short term, and then we want to transition to omnichannel personalisation,” she added. “So we do want to make sure that we can get a CDP up and running to enable us to do that.”

The foundational work positions UTS to take advantage of emerging technologies.

“We have a really great data unit that looks after AI within the university,” she said. “So it’s fantastic to have a conversation with them about how we need to lay the foundations effectively to capitalise on what’s coming. We may not be leveraging that in the first iteration, but we're certainly setting ourselves up to effectively manage that going forward.”

Crucially, the program has also helped embed strong cross-functional teams.

"One of the things I was really impressed with on this project was how the team handled everything. The way our partner, Levo, came together with the marketing and data teams was great. We used to meet on Friday mornings, and watching them tackle challenges on the fly and move right on to the next issue was impressive. Seeing those teams work together turned out to be a really unexpected and positive experience.'

Per Chalk, "It wasn’t something I had seen before—the level of intellectual problem-solving at a technical level. But [previously] the stakeholder negotiation and management kind of held that process back."

Reflecting on the achievements to date, Chalk told Mi3, "People launch websites all the time, but the challenges behind the complexity of a university environment are something else. The goal was to deliver something that stood out. Someone said to me, 'Oh, but it doesn't look like a university website,' and I thought—hallelujah, that’s exactly what we’re after. They all tend to look and perform the same."

"We wanted to be different."