Prior to engaging with us, INTO were unable to deliver a solution hosted outside of China because of the unique properties of the Chinese internet – notably, the ‘Great Firewall’.INTO therefore required us to prove we could deliver strong performance in China as part of an initial trial before we engaged fully to deliver the project. We were able to satisfy and exceed their expectations via combining an intrinsically high-performance architecture and tech stack, with intelligent use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

Modernising the Application Process

Traditionally, INTO had relied on a handwritten application process. Students would meet with an INTO agent, who would then complete a handwritten form to be submitted to the INTO admissions team.

This resulted in a laborious, time-consuming process that could lead to delays, errors, and dissatisfied users. Since the application was carried out by hand, no information was stored on a network, meaning that if any application forms were misplaced or damaged, the form would have to be resubmitted at the beginning of the process.

The secondary education model is vastly different from the INTO agent network for which the digital form was originally built, and it was therefore impossible for Cantarus to simply ‘transplant’ the agency model to the school network. We needed a full understanding of the intricacies of the typical secondary education workflows and processes in order to create a form that would be best suited to this environment and would provide the highest level of value to the counsellors.

The addition of the Partner Portal form to a school environment provides overseas students with even greater access to discover and apply to their ideal university, and by leveraging the relevant expertise and support of careers counsellors, students can use all of the tools at their disposal to make a strong application.

The university application experience is traditionally associated with a deluge of flyers, brochures, forms and other printed materials. INTO wanted to move away from a reliance on paper-based collateral and implement a digital-first approach. This shift in perspective may appear simple, but such a radical change required a clear strategy and a significant level of technical expertise.

The new digital content pages included all the information required for the university application process: campus guides, course prospectuses and subject profiles. We decided that it would be appropriate to serve the content ‘headlessly’ since some of it will be repurposed across agent-facing and student-facing portals, as well as PDF versions. INTO’s internal content editors are able to use this headless functionality to edit a single piece of content once, and the changes will then be made to all individual versions of the content.