Consistency at scale in higher education, Joyce Peralta | EvolveDigital Toronto 2026
Summary
Joyce Peralta, communications and marketing manager at McGill University, presented a comprehensive case study on achieving digital consistency across large higher education institutions. Speaking from over 20 years of experience across four universities, Peralta addressed the fundamental challenge of maintaining coherent digital experiences across complex academic ecosystems. McGill's ecosystem includes approximately 1,000 centrally hosted Drupal websites with 1,300 active content creators, 500 custom websites, and hundreds of internal platforms, generating 6,000-8,000 weekly content edits during peak periods.
The university faces common higher education challenges including siloed websites, inconsistent content, and fragmented user experiences that negatively impact student journeys from application through graduation. Peralta outlined McGill's three-pillar approach to digital consistency: institutional standards, governance frameworks, and community of practice. The university's nine digital standards emphasize being people-focused, data-driven, consistent, accessible, thorough, minimalist, secure, iterative, and collaborative.
These standards are reinforced through mandatory training for new staff and ongoing community engagement. The governance framework, developed over five years, defines roles and responsibilities across the website ecosystem, though Peralta acknowledged inconsistencies in implementation. The community of practice serves as the scaling mechanism, featuring groups like the Web Advisory Committee and Student Usability Panel that provide user experience insights and help evolve standards in response to emerging technologies like AI.
Peralta emphasized that this foundational work enabled McGill to shift conversations from 'what are our standards?' to 'how do we best apply them?' Current initiatives include developing an institution-wide content model through 50 subject matter expert interviews, improving journey map utilization, implementing a web registry in ServiceNow for better lifecycle management, and establishing structured governance processes with regular compliance checkpoints.
The presentation concluded with three key lessons: alignment must precede consistency, governance must earn trust through community involvement, and community engagement is the most scalable tool for implementing standards.
Key Takeaways
- •Alignment must come before consistency - shared vision is essential for difficult governance conversations
- •Community of practice is the most scalable tool for implementing digital standards across large organizations
- •Governance must earn trust to work effectively - involving community in governance creation increases buy-in
- •A minority of users create the majority of content edits, requiring targeted training and support strategies
- •Journey mapping reveals that one bad platform experience can negatively impact entire user workflows
- •Web registries with annual attestation requirements help maintain compliance and lifecycle management
- •Institution-wide content models are necessary to achieve consistent terminology and reduce fragmentation
- •Training should inspire independent learning and community participation rather than rote memorization
- •Structured approval processes for new sites and services are rare but essential for preventing ecosystem sprawl
- •Regular compliance checkpoints and renewal requirements prevent website abandonment and maintenance issues
- •Cross-platform integration between web registries and accessibility tracking tools improves governance monitoring
- •Foundational work in standards and governance enables advanced initiatives like AI implementation and personalization
Transcript
So, you're going to hear shortly from Joyce Peralta from McGill. Um, Joyce is communications and marketing manager at McGill. She spent over 20 years and experience building and she's been in higher ed for around 15 years. >> Uh, since 2002. >> Okay. >> Yeah. So, >> so whatever the math is there. >> Joyce is going to talk today a little bit about consistency at scale. So things that you she has done at Miguel to kind of create collaboration and even some of the things that she's achieved like Mi...
