10 Tips to Improve Your Economic Development Website

Key Insights

COVID-19 has heightened financial challenges for communities around the globe, leading higher education institutions to rethink their role in economic recovery. While inherent drivers of economic activity, institutions struggle to effectively communicate their role in economic development. A review of over 60 institutional websites revealed that many institutions do not prioritize economic development communication to internal and external stakeholders, with a large portion of schools not mentioning economic development on an institutional website.

What institutions must provide on their economic development websites

With fewer opportunities for institutions to be physically present in the community, online presence has only become more important in our virtual COVID-19 reality. Now more than ever, institutions must:

• Describe their economic development work and initiatives in a compelling way
• Publicly demonstrate their commitment to this work
• Clearly define their work to manage community expectations
• Provide a portal for engaging existing and potential partners, faculty, and other community stakeholders.

We compiled 10 essential components commonly seen among the most mature institutional economic development websites. Use these 10 components featured below on two mock webpages (including links to real institutional exemplar websites) to assess areas of strength and improvement for your current site, or to get started on building one.