Shorelight
Shorelight works with universities across the U.S. to create innovative programs that deliver comprehensive educational services to international students. Their platform connects international students, universities, and service providers to drive student enrollment and performance at scale.
“Shaun and his team were amazing to work with, and their findings and recommendations are already having an impact on Shorelight at the highest levels; we are actively changing our corporate strategy based on their work.”
The Challenge
Since its founding in 2013, Shorelight had grown quickly and its internal systems had grown with it, in all the ways that fast growth tends to produce: accumulated complexity, proliferating hand-offs, and measurement frameworks that tracked team activity rather than student outcomes. Meanwhile, growth was slowing and competitive pressure was increasing.
Shorelight came to us with a question about marketing and student engagement. We came back with a different answer: the growth blockers weren't primarily external, they were structural.
Our Approach
We took a service design approach that mapped the student experience, employee workflows, technical systems, and business performance metrics together, not separately. This matters because organizations that optimize each function independently often create friction at the seams, which is exactly where students were getting lost.
We synthesized existing qualitative research into behavioral personas and developed journey maps for three distinct student segments that Shorelight hadn't previously distinguished. Each segment had a different consideration period, different decision triggers, and different needs from the organization across the enrollment arc. Treating them as a single market meant that the service model was working well for one segment and poorly for the other two. This unlocked growth opportunities that required only modest effort to exploit.
The service blueprints we developed made the backstage dynamics visible: where hand-offs were occurring between teams, where measurement incentives were misaligned with the student experience, and where the organizational structure was actively working against the outcomes Shorelight cared about most.
Frontstage Impact
Three differentiated student journeys enabling new segment acquisition
Journey-based marketing initiatives tied to key conversion moments
Backstage Impact
Organizational restructure (Inside Sales merged with Admissions & Enrollment)
Journey-based performance metrics replacing functional activity metrics
Role
Strategist
Service Designer
Key Deliverables
Strategic Recommendations
Personas
Customer Journeys
Service Blueprints
An overview map showing which aspects of the business our deliverables addressed and how they related to the overall strategy. Because we delivered multiple artifacts that communicated aspects of our strategic recommendations, this visual guide helped orient everyone around how they all fit together.
A journeyman for one of the three customer segments we identified. Each of the segments had a different consideration period, which required different marketing outreach to effectively engage that segment. The highlighted area differed for each segment, allowing executives to easily see during their strategic retreat how—and why—each of these journeys differed (what our client called “passing the squint test”).
Synthesizing research data into customer journeys.
Outcomes
The findings reoriented Shorelight's growth strategy at the executive level. Student journey maps gave the marketing team a new framework for reaching and converting students they'd previously been unable to engage. We identified a set of initiatives tied to key moments in the journey—including online-to-offline engagement sequences—designed to increase conversion across all three segments.
The most significant outcome, though, was organizational. Based on our recommendations, Shorelight merged Inside Sales with Admissions and Enrollment Services, eliminating the hand-offs between those teams that had been creating friction for students and undermining retention. Performance measurement was restructured around journey-based experience metrics rather than functional activity metrics.
That kind of change, where the service design work directly reshapes how an organization is structured and measured, is what makes the difference between a good deliverable and lasting impact. As VP of Marketing Mark Brown put it: "We are actively changing our corporate strategy based on their work."