Get more value from your website budget with Continuous Care

Running a higher ed website means juggling nonstop demands:

• Admissions needs more microsites for recruitment.
• Marketing wants updated visuals and user journeys.
• IT is breathing down your neck about security and compliance.
• Leadership keeps asking, “Why haven’t we improved X yet?”

With everything on your plate, you’re not just managing a website — you’re managing a never-ending stream of competing priorities, stakeholder pressures, and technical landmines.

And every year, when budget season rolls around, you face the same brutal question:

Where can we get the most bang for our limited web budget?

For many institutions, that means looking at your ~$100,000 budget and thinking:

“Let’s hire a full-time specialist — maybe a developer, maybe a designer, maybe a content person — to solve our pain points.”

Here’s the honest truth no one tells you: That single hire won’t be enough.

Hiring one person gives you one skillset, one narrow perspective, and one set of hands. What happens when:

• You need development and design help?
• A critical CMS security release drops — but your hire’s busy on a redesign?
• Your hire goes on leave, quits, or simply doesn’t have the bandwidth?

Higher ed websites are too complex and too high-stakes to rely on a single unicorn hire. You need a team — a flexible, experienced, strategic team — that can meet the demands of your institution as they change.

Continuous Care: A smarter, more flexible investment

Continuous Care from Four Kitchens changes the entire equation.

Instead of sinking $100K into one role, Continuous Care gives you access to:

• Multiple developers with varied specialties
• Access to UX, visual design, and content strategy partners who know higher ed
• Dedicated Project Managers to keep things moving
• Engineering Leads who bring strategic insights from across the industry

And here’s the kicker:

✅ CMS security updates are free — they don’t eat into your hours.
✅ You can scale up or down anytime to match admissions cycles, campaigns, or major releases.

This isn’t just a retainer. It’s a living, breathing partnership that moves your institution forward.

Let’s be blunt: Most higher ed web teams are stuck in survival mode. You’re busy reacting to urgent tickets, scrambling to patch things, and watching your strategic goals gather dust on the shelf.

Continuous Care exists to break that cycle. With the backing of an experienced outside team, you’re not just fixing what’s broken — you’re actively improving.

Want to launch a new campaign? Done.

Need to overhaul a key page? Let’s go.

Want to align your backlog with long-term goals? We’ll map it out with you.

And because we work with dozens of higher ed institutions, we bring cross-institution insights that a single internal hire simply can’t match. We know what’s worked elsewhere — and we know what to steer you away from.

Here’s how other institutions have used Continuous Care to drive impact:

✅ Fast-track admissions microsites: Scaling up resources for two months to deliver on time, then scaling back to normal.
✅ Seamless Drupal upgrades: Completed as part of the ongoing subscription — no need for special funding requests or additional approvals.
✅ Campaign-driven enhancements: Rapid UX and design support to optimize key landing pages ahead of fundraising pushes.

This is why our higher ed clients stick with Continuous Care year after year: it’s predictable, flexible, and built to meet their evolving needs.

Higher ed is facing economic pressure like never before. Website budgets are under scrutiny. Leadership teams want to know:

What are we getting for what we’re spending?

The answer can’t be: “We kept the lights on.” With Continuous Care, you can confidently show that your web budget is fueling:
✅ Tangible improvements aligned with institutional goals
✅ Increased agility to respond to changing needs
✅ Broader expertise than you could ever hire with a single FTE

Your website is your most important digital asset. It’s where students, donors, and partners form their first impressions. Don’t gamble its future on one person — invest in a partnership that gives you the depth, flexibility, and strategic lift to make a real difference.

Let’s talk about how Continuous Care can help your team do more, worry less, and make measurable progress.

👉Contact us today to get started.