Web governance is fundamentally a people initiative that touches every department, shifts long-standing workflows, and redefines how an institution presents itself. Without deliberate stakeholder engagement, communication planning, and executive sponsorship, even the right model will fail. This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 covers the strategic case for consolidation. Part 3 covers execution and long-term sustainability.
Three Approaches to Governance and Consolidation
Governance isn’t one-size-fits-all. The right approach depends on your institution’s size, culture, and political realities. Most institutions land somewhere on a spectrum between full central control and total autonomy.
The model you choose matters less than how you manage the change.
Centralized: One team, one platform, one story
A single digital team controls the information architecture, design system, CMS platform, publishing standards, and content strategy. Colleges and offices contribute content, but they don’t independently choose platforms, designs, or structural patterns.
This model delivers the strongest brand consistency, the lowest long-term cost of ownership, and the cleanest structure for both AI search optimization and accessibility compliance. When something needs to be fixed—whether it’s a factual error, a security patch, or an accessibility issue—there’s one system to update. Centralized management also makes it far easier to implement consistent schema markup, URL hierarchies, and site architecture that AI systems need to correctly interpret and cite your content.
The trade-off is real: it requires a higher upfront investment in consolidation and migration, executive backing, and a willingness to navigate the political reality that departments accustomed to full autonomy may resist. Governance case studies at Brown and Harvard suggest that centralized models work best at small-to-mid-sized institutions or at larger institutions where leadership has made consolidation an explicit strategic priority.
Hybrid: Shared standards, local storytelling
The central team owns the global information architecture, design system, CMS platform, brand standards, and core pages. Colleges and offices own their local site sections, program nuance, news, events, and faculty stories—within the guardrails the central team sets. Think of it like a franchise model: central protects the brand and the playbook; colleges bring it to life for their audiences.
According to Modern Campus, hybrid models are often the most politically feasible path at large, complex universities. Research on building university web teams confirms that hybrid models still achieve significant cost savings because major infrastructure, licensing, and security costs are centralized even when content ownership is distributed.
The trade-off: hybrid governance requires more explicit policies, training, and enforcement. Without active stewardship, “hybrid” can quietly become “fragmented with a style guide.” Governance councils, regular audits, and ongoing editor training aren’t optional—they’re the mechanism that makes the model work.
Unmanaged: The default that gets more expensive every year
Each college or office chooses its own CMS, hosting, and design. No shared policy exists for domains, subdomains, or third-party tools. The central marketing team often learns about new sites after they’re already live.
This is consistently the most expensive model over time—it just hides the costs by distributing them across departmental budgets so no single leader sees the full picture. Students experience visual inconsistency, conflicting program information, and broken user journeys. And every unmonitored site adds to your accessibility remediation backlog and your AI search exposure.
Staying here isn’t a neutral choice. It’s a choice to let costs rise and brand trust erode—it just happens slowly enough that it’s easy to defer.
The Model Matters Less Than How You Manage the Change
Choosing the right model is necessary but not sufficient. Web consolidation is fundamentally a change management initiative, not a technology project. It touches every department, shifts long-standing workflows, and redefines how people across your institution contribute to its public story.
Internal stakeholders fear losing functionality, having to retrain on a new CMS, or losing control of content they’ve managed for years. Without a deliberate approach to managing those anxieties, they surface as resistance, scope creep, and internal conflict that can derail even a well-chosen governance model. As change management research consistently documents, the organizations that invest in structured stakeholder engagement before making changes see dramatically better adoption rates than those that rely on top-down mandates.
The good news: the strategies that make change management work in higher education are well documented. They just require the same kind of intentional planning that you’d bring to the technical side of a consolidation project.
Start with stakeholder discovery, not a site map
Data builds empathy in ways that internal arguments never will.
Ground decisions in user research, not opinions
Adopt a “both/and” approach to conflicting needs
One of the most common sources of stakeholder conflict is the false binary between centralized content and departmental autonomy. A dean needs their programs listed with local context and faculty highlights. The central team needs a consistent, cross-institutional program directory that serves prospective students.
The answer is usually architectural, not political. As CMS governance best practices suggest, enter content once and display it in multiple contexts. A program description lives in one place but surfaces both in the institutional directory and on the college’s section with local framing. This reduces maintenance burden while satisfying both audiences—and it’s the kind of solution that only emerges when you listen to what stakeholders actually need rather than what they say they want.
Secure visible executive sponsorship
Public endorsement from a chancellor, provost, or president frames consolidation as an institutional priority, not just a marketing initiative. Often with a large project the Chancellor publicly endorses the project at a university-wide assembly—a signal that tell every department this work isn’t optional and wouldn’t quietly go away.
Executive sponsorship does more than lend authority. It protects the project team when departments push back, which they will. It signals to deans and VPs that consolidation has the same institutional backing as other strategic priorities. And it gives the web team permission to make decisions that may be unpopular in the short term but serve the institution’s long-term interests.
Build a communication plan with tailored messaging
Different stakeholders care about different things. A structured communication plan should tailor the “why” to each audience:
- Faculty and department chairs care about workload impact and the ability to highlight work they feel is important. Lead with how the new model reduces their burden—shared templates, centralized training, and the fact that they won’t need to be their department’s de facto webmaster anymore.
- Deans and VPs care about how their college or division is represented. Show them how consolidation lifts their programs through a stronger institutional brand and better search visibility.
- Leadership (president, provost, CFO) care about enrollment ROI, cost efficiency, and risk reduction. The self-assessment from Part 1 of this series gives you the numbers to anchor this conversation.
- IT cares about security, infrastructure complexity, and support burden. Consolidation reduces their attack surface and the number of systems they need to monitor and patch.
The cadence matters too. Regular emails, an internal project blog, lunch-and-learn sessions, faculty senate presentations, and milestone updates keep the campus informed and prevent the rumor mill from filling information gaps. As change management research consistently shows, under-communicating or communicating too late creates confusion and resentment, while inclusion and consistency make even difficult transitions feel collaborative.
Make content migration a shared responsibility—with central quality control
What’s Next
Choosing a model and building campus support is the strategic middle of a consolidation initiative. In Part 3, we cover the execution: mapping your web ecosystem, defining ownership, pre-launch socialization (“road shows” that close the loop with stakeholders), training requirements, ongoing governance councils, and how to sustain the change over the long term.
Frequently Asked Questions
In a centralized model, a single digital team controls platforms, design, and publishing standards. In a hybrid model, the central team owns the infrastructure and brand standards while colleges and departments own local content within those guardrails. Hybrid is often more politically feasible at large institutions; centralized delivers the strongest brand consistency and lowest cost.
Web consolidation touches every department, shifts workflows, and redefines how people contribute to the institution’s public communication. Internal stakeholders fear losing control or being forced to retrain. Without deliberate stakeholder engagement and communication planning, these anxieties surface as resistance and scope creep that can derail even a well-designed governance model.
Start with listening, not presenting. Hold one-on-one meetings and department sessions to surface pain points. Ground design decisions in user research data rather than internal opinions. Tailor your messaging to faculty concerns—typically workload impact—and show how the new model reduces their burden through shared templates and centralized support.
Executive sponsorship—public endorsement from a chancellor, provost, or president—frames consolidation as an institutional priority. It protects the project team when departments resist, signals to deans that the initiative has strategic backing, and gives the web team permission to make decisions that serve the institution’s long-term interests.
Experience suggests that asking departments to rewrite their own content often fails—quality is inconsistent and deadlines are missed. A more effective approach is to centrally audit and edit pages based on departmental input. Departments contribute their knowledge; the central team shapes it into content that meets institutional standards.
Use a “both/and” approach: architect the CMS so content is entered once and displayed in multiple contexts. A program description can surface in an institutional directory and on a college’s section with local framing, reducing duplication while satisfying both audiences.
