This post was written by Marianne Amoss, Fastspot’s content strategist and resident writer.

What is the next generation of admissions marketing? And how can we integrate Web marketing and print marketing? These are questions that plague universities and colleges across the country, as they struggle with the cost and manpower required to keep materials updated and accurate—and see classes of increasingly Web-savvy students coming through their doors. When Tufts University considered these questions, they naturally turned to Neustadt Creative Marketing, which had worked with the school on undergraduate admissions for the schools of arts and sciences and engineering and on a university-wide brand strategy.

Tufts is a highly selective private university in the suburbs of Boston. NCM, a seasoned expert in providing marketing services to educational institutions, knew that Tufts would be ripe for a smart, creative approach. They launched an extensive, five-month-long market research project among prospective students and their parents to start to answer that question. Out of that research, NCM defined a series of marketing goals that altered the messaging strategy that Tufts was using, says Mark Neustadt, principal of NCM. What did they settle on? A relatively unconventional plan, says Neustadt: an “integrated program that abandoned the traditional package of print materials entirely and replaced it with a three-times-a-year magazine which coordinated with an admissions ‘microsite.’”

Once Tufts adopted the report’s recommendations, NCM brought Fastspot in on the project; the two companies collaborate frequently under the name Door No. 2. Together, the two teams worked together to design and develop the magazine, concept the stories, write the first issue, develop the Web design, architect the Website, build it, load in the content, and finally launch the joint project on 11/11/11. Fastspot also created a new virtual campus tour for Tufts, which launched at the same time.

The magazine, named Jumbo after the school mascot, is now published online and in print three times a year and mailed to students in the admissions funnel. The site and magazine are run on Fastspot’s BigTree CMS, a user-friendly content management system that allows the Tufts admissions staff to easily update admissions information and keep up with trends without assistance from their internal IT team. “Viewbooks can take over a year to develop and are very costly and difficult to update,” Neustadt says. “A three-times-a-year magazine is relatively economical to update and can be much more responsive to changes going on in admissions.”

It’s important to note that this program does not completely do away with print—or migrate everything to the Web, Neustadt says. “A lot of people think that’s what this is all about. This is not about eliminating print. But what is has done, which is incredibly exciting, is create a print program that is consistent with the pace and the energy of the Web.” Tufts now has an admissions microsite that is essentially separate from the main site; Door No. 2, which loads in the content for each issue of Jumbo (with minimal tech support), serves as “managing editor,” helping ensure that the content is consistent, professional, and on-strategy.

Since launch, the site has been enormously successful. Analytics show that the site is getting lots of traffic; the dean of admissions, Lee Coffin, often gets several dozen comments on his blog posts. “One of the successes of the design has been the integration of social media and the content,” says Neustadt. And Tufts has gotten students involved, creating a student group whose charge it is to create new content; you can see student-generated photos and content throughout the site. “Tufts has a superbly run admissions operation, and they are at a point in their evolution as an office where their staff feels energized and capable to take this on.”

There are lots of moving parts, and they all mesh together, seemingly effortlessly, from the print magazine to the Web to the social media. As Neustadt puts it, “It’s a smart approach to print.”

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Re-posting this article due to lots of discussion lately – let us know what you think!

Before clients see BigTree CMS, Fastspot’s proprietary content management system, they often ask us why we built our own when there are so many out there that we could have simply used. When they ask me, I usually picture this. I have seen these CMS offerings, and frankly, they are horrible. How could I ever expect my clients to wade through instruction manuals numbering in the thousands of pages when they should be focused on content? What is the point of purchasing a CMS if you need to hire several programmers or experts to run it? Why would I actually expect my clients to willingly log into a system that is unusable, unfriendly and doomed to frustrate and confuse as they try to update a page or change a video clip?

Clearly, there are different “types” of content management systems and there are blogs and companies that do nothing but rate them, review them, provide training for them, etc.. It is an industry of its own, and with little oversight or benchmarks being applied, it is confusing to determine what makes a good CMS. Here are the things that make a good CMS; they are built into BigTree CMS and enjoyed by our clients:

1. Easy to use. Let’s face it. Most of the time, you want someone who knows words and pictures doing the editing and updating on copy and imagery, not a computer scientist. I don’t know about you, but I only know a few very special people who can claim to be a programmer, a designer and a copywriter. If my goal is to be thinking about words and tone and audience, don’t make me worry about code.

2. Intelligent. If I need a piece of content to be placed in multiple places in the Website, it would be nice if the CMS could handle that for me. The benefit of a customized solution is that the development team can tweak the CMS to anticipate your needs and be ready to deliver when you need it to.

3. Helpful. When I need help, I want to get to it quickly and easily. Tool tips, easy-to-locate help sections, videos on how to do a certain process, FAQs—these are all extremely helpful. I like for this kind of information to be built into the system I am using so I don’t have to leave my CMS to find the information on a Website or, even worse, in a 1,000 page written manual.

4. Flexible. If I am going into my CMS to update a bullet point, I don’t want to have to jump through 30 hoops to get it done. Likewise, if I am adding an entire new section to the site—setting up new templates, adding links to the navigation, inputting SEO-relevant content, and setting up modules—then I expect some complexity, along with some checks and balances along the way.

5. Powerful. If I want something to be done, it should be possible. This is one of the reasons we developed our own CMS:  So we could do the things we wanted to be done within the system. It’s also why we developed it on open-source platforms. That way, our clients aren’t beholden to us if they want to build upon the system.

6. Intuitive. If I want to move a navigation item higher on the list of drop down items, wouldn’t it be nice to simply drag and drop it in the list? If I need to upload an image to use in a template or inline, wouldn’t it be nice if the system automatically knew the size and ratio and let me crop the image accordingly during the upload process? Oh, how we dreamt of sleep-filled nights without the worry of broken links or content that wasn’t being indexed by Google. Well, we answered our own dreams with BigTree—and any good CMS out there should be doing the same.

7. Stable. Don’t you love when you hit one button and it seems the whole internet goes down? Or, at the very least, it seems you may have fried some sort of major thing with servers and possibly satellites and you swear you smell smoke? A good CMS should keep you out of harm’s way. You shouldn’t be able to do massively bad things without being loudly prompted (several times) by your CMS:

“Are you sure you want to delete that page?”
“Are you sure you want to erase a week’s worth of work?”
“Are you sure you want to take down the whole site just because you want that animated gif in the copy?”

Additionally, if you do make a mistake and cause a problem, it should be a recoverable problem. Hitting one button somewhere should never take down your whole site. Ever.

8. Secure. You want the people who need to know, knowing. And those who only need to know a little, well, they should be in the ‘know a little’ room. A good CMS should allow for security and user account settings to be configured in such a way as to protect your sensitive information on the back end of your site, as well as on the front end. The system should only show users what they have been authorized to see. No more. That way, your disgruntled intern can’t mosey on over to the professional bios section and add a line about Mr. Smith’s prized Chia Pet collection…or something like that. You get the idea.

9. Pleasant. If you want your team to do something, willingly, proactively even, that something better be pleasant to engage with. Have you ever had your team say “no thanks” when you’ve invited them down for a pizza/brainstorming session? You make the brainstorm process more pleasurable by including the pizza. A little pleasure goes a long way, which is why we think a CMS’s administrative area should be as nice looking as the front-facing Website, if not nicer. It should be organized, friendly, use real world language—not things like “vars” or “default”—that make sense only to programmers. It should help you if you make a mistake, allow you to play without fear of crashing, and inspire you to log in and keep creating great content! A CMS is essentially tools for the creative process, same thing as Photoshop to designers, or paint and brushes to a painter. Who wants to create something in a sterile, threatening and confusing environment?

10. Simple. This is the most important element for a good CMS. Simple does not mean weak or limited. Simplicity is difficult to achieve and requires great effort and restraint to get it right. Sure, we could probably add modules to BigTree that would allow our clients to do some crazy stuff, but they don’t really need it. And, if they do, it’s one client out of a million. In that case, we do something custom just for them. Keeping the CMS simple allows you to build a solid foundation first. Then you have time in real world scenarios to determine if you really need it to reposition that satellite or not.

What do you think? Share your thoughts on what makes a good CMS, and don’t forget to tell us who you are. Perspective is everything!

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There is a fatal flaw in many of the content management systems (CMS) out on the market today. I refer to it as the 10/90 failure. The CMS has naturally evolved to provide complex functionalities that are desirable to about 10% of its eventual users, often created in response to the request of developers and more experienced computer users. In an effort to continue to offer more advanced functionalities (or often simply a case of over-engineering from the outset) you end up with an interface and set of tools which alienates and confuses the needs of the remaining 90% of the users. So you cater to 10%, in spite of the needs of the 90%.

The balance between usability and complex computing and data management is the stuff of legends. It can make or break a product, a company and to some degree the client who is making the purchasing decision. One must never underestimate a system’s inherent “like-ability”, just as hiring a wildly unpopular or disruptive staff member can upset the entire balance of a team. Let’s not forget the ongoing demise of MySpace in favor of Facebook, which is often credited to the overly complex customization options available to MySpace users (which resulted in a noisy and often disjointed virtual space). People who use systems like order, they like processes that make sense, and they like visually appealing interfaces.

When considering CMS options, it is critical to evaluate the needs of your 90%, ensuring the CMS meets those needs, before you focus on the needs of the 10%. Otherwise you end up catering to such a small set of your resources that you will never leverage your total potential. It is assumed that the 90% will get on board, go to training meetings, read the manuals, suddenly develop a love for complex interfaces and terminologies like “null”, and become nimble CMS users. This is a dream seldom realized.

Now I’m not advocating you forgo the needs of your most computer savvy and technically minded subset, simply that you ensure those tools and interfaces are not “required reading” for the 90%. A good CMS should separate the tasks of the masses and the tasks of the experts – they should not share the same user space. Your developer tools should be clearly indicated as “for geeks only”, and the things that are user friendly for the rest of us should be front and center. Trust me, your IT developers won’t care if they have to click through a few nicely designed screens to get to the parts they want, they probably won’t even notice. But if the reverse is asked, you can assume much of your 90% will be intimidated, get confused or become overwhelmed, choosing to opt out of whatever task they had tried to undertake.

I think about the things I enjoy doing everyday. The ones that have succeeded and become part of my daily routine are those things that offer the lowest barrier to success, and even provide a little encouragement and fun along the way. We’ve all seen the success of the iPhone over most other smart phones, and now the iPad over the straggling competitors in the tablet market. Apple has excelled in providing the best user experience for the majority of its users. Sure there are a small fraction who will prefer an Android device or a tablet that allows them to hack into it and do very specific things, but this is not the needs of the majority. The majority usually need to perform more generalized tasks, such as updating content, or adding a new publication to a bio, or perhaps starting a FAQ or setting up some other online resource. Many simply want an easy way to work with words, pictures, video and documents. Simple needs, which should not require tasks akin to launching missiles to achieve.

In a society dominated by personal voices and the social networks fueling constant self-publishing, it is an absolute imperative that every team member is empowered to publish, moderate, discuss, interact and share the things that are important to them, in a way that encourages frequency and consistency. If these aspiring publishers are part of your team, are you giving them the best tools possible? I recommend frequent brainstorm meetings where team members (representing the 90%) are asked to write down the top 10 things they want to be able to do online everyday. Then make sure your CMS is allowing them to do those things.

Have a good tip for determining what makes for a good CMS? Have a CMS you love and want to world to know about? Have a CMS wish list item you’d care to share? Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts!

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We created Denote, a tool to allow for the communication on live sites between client and vendor. It’s up to you to use it for good, not evil.

Denote For Good, Not Evil from TraceyHalvorsen on Vimeo.

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Content Management Systems Matter More than Website Design

Yes, I said it. And more importantly, I believe it. People are coming to your Website for content. Not for an experience, not to see some mind blowing visuals, not to shed a tear at the sheer beauty – they are coming to hear what you have to say. How you say something is very important, and design has a ton to do with that. But if your content is stale, uninspired or lack luster, no amount of award winning web design will provide the remedy. A good content management system (CMS) is the difference between life and death for your Website. Even if you have great words of wisdom, poetic lines of insight, paragraphs of genius to share with your readers – if you don’t have a good CMS, your words may never see the backlit displays they are crying out for.

In many ways, a Website is simply a tool for delivering information, like a book or a television commercial. Of course, the packaging is important, but more and more, with online content, users simply want to get to the content. Great design goes hand in hand with great usability, great navigation, great search engine optimization, great simplicity. And if the CMS is a clunky mess that is a pain to use, chances are you will avoid those updates, feel stressed at the thought of adding content, and even feel bad assigning those tasks to someone else on your team. Content, once conceived, should be easy to add to a Website. The content creator’s biggest challenge should be in coming up with the messages, not inputting them into the system.

I have seen many clients skimp on content creation and spend their budget on enterprises level content management systems that can literally communicate with satellites. I have also seen clients work tirelessly on crafting compelling and important content, only to have it sit in draft form while some developer in a far off location is tracked down to fix a bug in some clunky free solution implemented by the local webpage shop. Neither of these situations are recommended, nor will they bear any fruit. In fact, what you need before you need anything else, is the CMS.

Content will change, evolve, get better, become more fine tuned. As it does, you need a system for getting this new content onto your site. You need a CMS that will make you feel empowered to grow your content, confident that your team can keep fresh and relevant content on your site, relaxed knowing the CMS is doing all it can to ensure your content is found by search engines. Additionally, your CMS should allow your content to do more than simply be seen and read. It should optimize it for you, training you to create SEO friendly headlines and titles, checking for broken links, ensuring outside sites open in new windows, assisting with image size requirements. The CMS should take all the headaches of updating a Website away, so you can focus on what you have to say.

If your CMS is causing headaches, preventing your team from making updates, requiring you to spend more time thinking about how to work the CMS than what your new Website content is going to be, I dare say you’ve chosen badly, or gotten stuck with a poor solution.

Here are things to look for and think about when deciding what CMS is best for your business.

• Do you have a full time person or team who will be assigned to maintaining and operating the CMS? If yes – then you want to ensure the technology employed by the CMS matches the skill sets of the team you have in place. If no, make sure you don’t purchase a CMS that requires IT professionals to use it.
• What other business are using the CMS? Talk to them, find out how happy they are.
• How SEO friendly is the CMS? Does it use semantic markup and things like <H1> tags to help Google index the content? You can usually tell by “viewing source” on any page that is generated by the CMS. (If you see <table> or <tr> tags instead of <H1> or <H2> tags, the CMS is outdated and generating problematic code.)
• Can someone use the CMS without taking a training course? If not, how much training do they need and how often will they need refreshers?
• How big is the user manual? If the manual is over 100 pages, perhaps there is more going on than you need?
• Does the company that created the CMS still own it? My point is, are you buying a system from a company that isn’t really able to support it? Do your research, your most powerful tool is Google.

Once you decide upon a CMS, make sure your team stays involved. Empower them to take control of their content, the more they care the more the content will connect to your prospective audiences.

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