Case Study: Cornell University achieves rapid, unified content production and seamless WordPress migration with GatherContent

Connecting silos with GatherContent during a university website redesign

Cornell University, a private Ivy League research university founded in 1865 with roughly 22,000 students, faced a major content and technology challenge when its alumni.cornell.edu and giving.cornell.edu sites were flagged as legacy, non‑responsive, inaccessible and poorly governed. The sites had thousands of outdated pages, broken links, many contributors with varying skills, and no clear editorial process, so Cornell engaged Mule Design and set out to redesign both sites and centralize content production.

The team used GatherContent as the single source of truth, implementing a simple five‑stage bespoke workflow and onboarding 30–40 contributors and reviewers. Content was rewritten, pared down from ~2,000–3,000 pages per site to under 200, and migrated via an automated GatherContent→WordPress integration. The result: content production and approval in 3–4 weeks, smoother cross‑department collaboration, reduced manual work and errors, and a user‑friendly site delivered on time and within budget with strong staff and user satisfaction.

Cornell University

Thomas Deneuville

Director of Web Services and User Experience