CTT in the News - 2004

Peter Sweatman discusses “Content Management Systems”

Charity Times - Online Insight Colunm- June 2004
Content Management Systems – or CMS – are one of the great misnomers of the web.  The root lies in the widely held belief among not-for-profits that a CMS is a technology tool, when in fact it is much, much more…

A better understanding of CMS comes through an analysis of the three words themselves :

• “Content” – this is the centre-piece for most charity fundraising and the informational foundation which allows the correct projection of a charity’s work to its stakeholders.  Getting the communication of content right, and through the right channels, is critical for a successful charity.
• “Management” – in this context refers to the process by which content is captured by the organization, interpreted and filtered by its human beings and output to its stakeholders.
• “System” – a term which, in this context, refers to the regulated interaction of people, business process, content and technology.

On the assumption that when individuals or institutions give money to not-for-profit organizations they wish to see some evidence of the impact of their donation, then the better sourcing, refining and distribution of content is the key to strong donor relationships.  This information “feedback loop” is what can be managed by a CMS and is why the good selection of a CMS is critical to the success of a fundraising charity in today’s environment.

The selection of a CMS tool, however, is much more complicated than – for example - the purchase of a fundraising database.  At the simple end of the market, vendors refer to the editors which enable non-HTML literate staff to enter text onto a charity website as a CMS.  At the other extreme, Oxfam International recently implemented an open-source based CMS to provide an information dashboard gathering up-to-the-minute reports from operations around the world to be consolidated and enable better quality decision making at HQ in emergencies.  Hence the notion that a standard tender process to select a CMS tool which can be implemented “out of the box” or “off the shelf” is generally flawed, unless we are strictly focused on simple and cheap WYSIWYG editors for updating a website.

To select the right CMS, an organization needs to be aware of (and ideally have mapped) its internal interdependencies of technology with people and information.  In the following list the higher elements depend entirely on those below to “work properly” :

• The Software Application:  In this case a technology or suite that sits on
• The Hardware and Communications Infrastructure:  Which represents the invested ability for correct processing and transfer of
• Information as Data:  Meaning the codified or captured content which has been input into electronic form by
• People: An organization’s key asset and those upon which the rest of the infrastructure (and its working correctly) relies.

A CMS builds upon the business processes and the people in an organization and stretches through information capture and storage, hardware & comms and up into functional application and “look-and-feel”.  As with most software applications, a not-for-profit should not be lured into buying a system because it looks good, as pure CMS is primarily a back-end system and very little of its core can be differentiated by the front-end.  Usability, however, is key to a CMS’ success, as the interface of the system with the people is one that MUST be right.  If content is going to be captured, stored, sorted and then re-used repeatedly across an array of channels, the users must be comfortable with their interface with the system and feel that it does not add a huge extra task to their probably already full days.

Finally, if a charity, or not-for-profit, is looking to make a CMS the core of the management of content within its electronic walls then it must interface with other systems that the organization and its people use as standard.  This means any of those used among : Email client (eg. Outlook), Internal document production software (eg. MS Word, Powerpoint etc), Fundraising or other contacts databases (eg. Raiser’s Edge, Access, etc), Publishing software, accounting tools and so on.

At CTT we see a CMS as being more than just a standard, easy to package application for a charity, it’s more like the systems’ glue that sits between other applications and acts as a clever conduit between other data/information input and output devices and the people who create content and those who require or want to use it.  Experience shows that the selection of a CMS can be complex, for the above reasons, but my advice would be – start small and pilot a CMS with growth capacity in an area or department that can pave the way for the rest of the organization.  Use software that can grow with you.

Peter Sweatman, CEO