Opportunity Next

The challenge: reach seniors before they leave school

The deadline came from the students themselves. The site had to reach graduating seniors while they were still in school, so a first version had to be live within weeks of kickoff and the full site by spring. Many of the families it serves are the first in their family to plan for college, so the site needed plain language, a sense of belonging and a Spanish version, which Colorado requires for this kind of program. And Common Group wanted the career content to be live, not static: real programs and real Colorado job postings for each of the state's eight high-priority pathways, pulled from Lightcast, a labor market data platform.

How we designed and built Opportunity Next in two phases

We split the work in two. Phase 1 was a home page and a Find Your Next Opportunity page: the program's mission, the eight pathways, institutions by region, help with financial aid forms and a way to request a coach, with Common Group's Intercom chatbot on top. ThreeSixtyEight's UX strategist shaped the information architecture, our designer Serggio Montilva designed it, and our team built it in Webflow and walked the client through the dev site before launch.

Phase 2 was the hard part. To bring Lightcast into Webflow, Marcelo and Federico worked directly with Lightcast's team: mapping its program and career data to Colorado's pathways, finding the right endpoints and testing them against real postings. Each pathway page now pulls the programs offered by the state's scholarship institutions and a set of current Colorado jobs, and a job search page lets students dig further.

• 8 high-priority pathway pages, from Advanced Manufacturing to Transportation
• 10 Lightcast API endpoints integrated into Webflow

"Individual pathway pages look good"
— Kelly Anguiano, Program Director, Common Group

How we launched Opportunity Next

The first phase went live on opportunitynext.org within about seven weeks of our internal kickoff. The full site, with the Lightcast-powered pathway pages, the job search and Spanish versions of the main pages, went live in May 2024. When Lightcast added a filter by award level, we wired it into the live site so the programs shown matched the scholarship rules.

What happened after launch

Opportunity Next ran on the Webflow build we delivered for the rest of the program's life. Common Group kept publishing on it, with news about the program and its students, and the pathway pages, the job search and the Spanish pages stayed in place through the program's planned sunset in mid-2025, with the site still online into 2026. Today the program's address points to the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

• 2 languages: English and Spanish
• 2 years on the Webflow build we delivered

Credits

Client: Common Group, for the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT). Kelly Anguiano (Program Director)

Agency partner: ThreeSixtyEight. Account management, project management and UX strategy

Design and Webflow build: Fri3nds, for ThreeSixtyEight. Serggio Montilva (design), Richard Reynolds (Webflow lead), Federico Rano (Lightcast integration), Camila Ardila (project manager), Marcelo Russo

Data: Lightcast API

Services: Webflow design and development, API integration, Intercom chatbot setup, Spanish pages