A better way to manage content?
In my previous incarnation as an IT consultant, I spent several years in Europe and here in America helping large companies to implement contact management solutions. So as I was reading Winning Campaigns Online, many of the problems raised struck a familiar chord.
One in particular struck me today - that of content management and allowing non-programmers to edit web pages. It is suggested in the book that the optimum approach is ensure that the web developer can work as productively as possible but I see several issues with this approach:
For me, the ideal solution is to remove the need for a web developer to do the updating and instead let those directly responsible for creating content also publish it on the web site, leaving the web developer to do the tasks only they are qualified to perform. The book talks about using SSI to achieve this, but there are now software packages that can do this and much more.
One package I have used is Documentum. It is a very powerful tool, and possibly too expensive for smaller campaigns, but once the core templates are created, anyone can update, review and publish content to the web site, and add basic formatting, similar to the blogger software we are all using.
In the same way, because the content is published within pre-defined templates, the navigation experience for the user is always consistent, a key part of usability. Take a look at what it can do  in my experience, everyone benefited from this approach.
One in particular struck me today - that of content management and allowing non-programmers to edit web pages. It is suggested in the book that the optimum approach is ensure that the web developer can work as productively as possible but I see several issues with this approach:
- Most web developers like to do more complicated coding that just updating some pages using basic HTML, so will find doing such tasks repetitive and boring.
- In most cases, the developer doesnÂt understand the content, so is less likely to spot a mistake until it is too late.
- The web developer can become a bottleneck to uploading new content when several departments are constantly producing new information to be uploaded.
For me, the ideal solution is to remove the need for a web developer to do the updating and instead let those directly responsible for creating content also publish it on the web site, leaving the web developer to do the tasks only they are qualified to perform. The book talks about using SSI to achieve this, but there are now software packages that can do this and much more.
One package I have used is Documentum. It is a very powerful tool, and possibly too expensive for smaller campaigns, but once the core templates are created, anyone can update, review and publish content to the web site, and add basic formatting, similar to the blogger software we are all using.
In the same way, because the content is published within pre-defined templates, the navigation experience for the user is always consistent, a key part of usability. Take a look at what it can do  in my experience, everyone benefited from this approach.
3 Comments:
I agree with everything you have to say here, especially with your point about a web developer not noticing a problem since he doesn't understand the content in the way that the writer does. It certainly seems like anything that allows the political professional to author the content without screwing up the look or navigation of the site is a major plus. I'm not sure what exactly is out there for the typical low-resource campaign, but something along the lines of what you are describing would be huge.
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Unquestionably, good CM tools provide tremendous labor savings, in addition to ensuring that the code is consistent. Using Atomz, for instance, one non-programmer can easily handle the responsibility of daily updates to multiple sections of a 500-page site, with cross-posting, automatic link generation, automatic search indexing, and so on. It's a godsend.
However, this functionality is expensive. When I last ran comparisons about a year ago, content management solutions using Documentum, Vignette, Atomz, or comparable systems were typically priced at about $20,000 per year minimum.
It is hard to find official price information for Documentum and other leading CM tools, but this quote is representative of the unofficial comments I've seen: "Pricing for in-house large-scale content management systems is done on a case-by-case basis, i.e., it's very expensive. It is estimated that a subscription based content management system could cost approximately $2000 per month.
This is completely beyond the budget of all but the very largest political campaigns.
My own company has invested in a block of licenses from Atomz, which reduces the per-license costs somewhat, but it remains beyond the cost of small campaigns and non-profits. For the most part, only my corporate and government clients can afford the luxury of saving labor. They have little choice. Companies and government agencies do not have volunteers willing to donate their labor.
Campaigns and non-profits, on the other hand, often do have volunteers who are willing to donate their labor. Perhaps as a result, they tend to take the view that spending cash simply to save labor is a bad trade-off.
They will spend money to increase fundraising success or for media buys, but are very reluctant to do so merely to reduce labor and increase efficiency — especially for Internet-related tasks. Sometimes this is a rational choice, sometimes not. In any case, the political sector is very different from the commercial sector when it comes to IT priorities and budgets.
Because small campaigns simply cannot afford solutions such as Documentum or Atomz, they need a solution that costs, for example, no more than $200/mo., including server costs, software fees, and the labor of setting up the template to match the candidate's site.
Keep in mind, too, that the duration of the campaign is often less than a full year. In other words, for small campaigns (which are the majority of political campaigns) you often have a total CM budget of less than $2,000 for the whole campaign. (Just a market report comparing the top CM tools can cost twice that much.)
Another consideration is that setting up these templates is a specialized skill beyond HTML, because normally proprietary tags are used. In other words, it's expensive to set up the templates, unless they are standardized "cookie-cutter" templates, which virtually no one wants.
There are some good little website templates out there (comparable to the templates Blogger provides). I recommend them to prospective clients who come to me with almost no budget. In my experience, however, such candidates prefer a bad custom-made site to a good cookie-cutter site.
Open source is, of course, one possible solution. I've seen clients use open source code with varying results. If open source tools are configured skillfully (and not by neophytes working with no plan and no protocols), they can provide efficient CM solutions on a shoestring budget.
Unfortunately, they can also lead to CM fiascoes that no one on the campaign staff knows how to fix (such as the national campaign in 2004 whose Drupal and Plone website became so crash-prone that as Election Day neared, the server was running a script to restart itself every ten minutes).
Having said this, it is clear that the landscape is changing rapidly and new solutions are becoming available. Before publishing the third edition this year, I will review what's out there. If you know of a good off-the-shelf CM solution that meets these budget constraints, let me know.
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