ConnectEd, a site built by Demand for our partner and customer, Laureate Education, is the epitome of the Demand Media Manifesto.  After spending a few months gaining a deep understanding of Laureate’s business, and helping Laureate better understand what drives us here at Demand, the Professional Services team here built ConnectEd, the first of a few sites we are developing for Laureate.

Here is how we did it:

Every day, we listened to our customer, and to our customer’s customer.  No one knows Laureate’s business better than they do, and our approach to building a compelling destination for Laureate’s prospective students was to go deep.  We spent more than a month interviewing the team at Laureate, understanding their needs, and analyzing all of the data that we could find.  We used all of the same tools for Laureate that we use to insure that we are meeting our audiences’ needs for our great veridical properties, like LIVESTRONG and eHow.  And we used the Studio of Demand Media to develop content that works based on what people are really looking for.  “Start each day listening to the customer” – check!

People are faced with problems and challenges every day.  “How do you teach kids Spanish?”  “How do I identify gifted and talented students?”  “What are activities for teaching students about business?”  These are real questions to real challenges for educators, one of the markets that Laureate serves.  Our approach to enabling Laureate to become part of the conversation, and build mindshare within the market, was to help answer those questions.  The Studio created more than 1000 articles and 60 videos within 3 months that are high quality, informative, and useful.  “Make content is unequivocally useful” – check!

But content alone is not enough.  Content must be high quality.  Content must be accessible.  Content needs to be engaging, and part of a dialog.  We are not serving just an audience – we are serving people that are passionate about what they do, and want to engage in a community of likeminded individuals.  This is core to our belief, so we made sure that the ConnectEd site had the best community tools:  integrated Social Media as part of the site, not an adjunct to it.  And we made it all look good by leveraging our expertise in Information Architecture, User Experience and User Interface Design, and Information Taxonomy; substance and style!  “Build superior web experiences” – check!

The site just launched yesterday – it is the product of a team that never rests, that sets goals at Internet scale, and shatters them.  I count myself lucky to work alongside so many great people that can take our customer’s basic need, “How do we attract the people interested in what we can provide them,” and turn it into something tangible and substantive.  Jeremy, Glen, Mike, Charlie, Andrew, the Studio – hats off to you guys – amazing work!