Content Management

The Brief
The CMA's overall objective was to 'improve the delivery of information to catchment stakeholders and the community'. Previously the CMA team had been manually publishing web pages to their website in HTML. This was time consuming and ment the team was required to spend more time on the process of updating pages than the craft of communications.

Accordingly, the CMA was looking for a website and a content managment platform that would, among other things, enable the web team to effectively:

• provide relevant, up to date and targeted information to a range of stakeholders,
• enable their constituency to interact with the CMA in an effective manner, and
• provide access to a range of existing resources and publications.
   

Our Solution
During our due diligence we identified that:

• the website needed to serve the needs of a wide range of stakeholders, some with very different needs;
• there was an opportunity over time to move a number of manual processes to an online environment to improve access and transparency; and
• there was an active and engaged community that supported the goals and objectives of the CMA that could be stimulated and motivated through developing an online community.

As with many digital projects, we worked with the CMA to identify an appropriate staged approach. The first stage was simply to migrate the CMA website to a proper content management system.

We proposed to develop the CMA's website on populus as this had the breadth of functionality to expand to grow with the CMA's requirements over time. The initial implementation included the following components:

• web publishing (sections, articles, modules)
• CRM (email broadcast, membership and access levels)
• forms
• calendar
• web analytics (Google Analytics)

We also added a custom interactive map of the region on the homepage to assist people to navigate around the site.
 
The Result
The result can be seen at www.hcr.cma.nsw. The project was delivered on time. The CMA team had chosen to manage the intial content load internally, and the site went live in February 2010. populus has greatly improved the CMA's team ability to publish content to the website. We are currently finalising a Phase II project with the CMA to move one of their existing offline reporting processes online, and start enabling the development of an online community.