For common people
For common people
If user uptake reflects success then The Salvation Army’s new content management system has achieved this. Liam Tung looks at how Manager of e-commerce and internet communications, Michael Bouy has managed the transition and training of staff across 800 centres.
When Michael Bouy first joined the Salvation Army, he was placed in the public relations department. The charity faced the challenge of entering the electronic marketplace and developing a web infrastructure that would accommodate a vast network of content authors.
The Salvos have over 800 centres in Australia and until Bouy came along its websites bloomed chaotically. Websites were built reactively and under different domain names. This became difficult to manage and impacted Internet users’ ability to find information about the Salvation Army, its churches, social services and fundraising.
Thankfully Bouy is no stranger to major projects. Originally from the U.S., he spent years working on Pentagon-funded projects. In 1985 he participated in a project aimed at converting tonnes of technical documentation onto CD-ROMS. In Australia he worked on e-commerce projects for millions of users to make online superannuation queries and contributions.
With a small team and a dispersed user group, the project for The Salvation Army has been no less challenging.
Bouy says, “It was a matter of communicating a vision of bringing everything under one umbrella, setting up a single portal and everything residing under one domain name.” From an organisational standpoint, it was a logical vision; politically it was a different matter and was only achieved after convincing his users of the benefits.
It would be three years before the final implementation took place. Bouy and his small but dedicated team needed to bring 40 to 50 websites across to a new portal, then find a software product to enable web-illiterate people to edit their websites. Bouy spent one year searching for it.
In the meantime, Salvation Army programs continually created their own websites hosted on the new portal. Bouy says this was fine in the early days - he had designed the hosting to provide centralised access to 250 websites with thousands of pages of information about The Salvation Army’s multiple service-units - but it eventually became a critical support issue for his limited resources.
As requests to create new sites and new functionality and make updates for each site became more demanding, it became necessary to look at a content management system which empowered “non-web-heads”.
Desperately seeking simplicity
The Salvation Army’s London-based world headquarters wanted Bouy to start using its Lotus Notes CMS because it was free but, says Bouy, “Trying to use it was difficult even for an experienced person” let alone the diverse range of users he wanted to empower.
He then looked at other options. 15 companies were approached however only nine replied with a proposal that addressed the requirements, including local support, which was an essential criterion for Bouy. “We really wanted a local company where we wouldn’t have to rely on overseas contacts for support.”
In the end, none of these vendors would supply the new CMS. Bouy says, “I was speaking at a conference and there was Bruce Wren at a booth. I hadn’t heard of Netcat before.”
After adding Netcat to the list, he says, “We narrowed the shortlist down to four companies and then did site visits to look at the interface, back-end and how to use the system.
“Some of the solutions were too basic, some were too complex for the end-users, and some companies were quoting on vapour-ware, saying ‘we will build it’ but I’m not going to buy on that basis. There are too many pitfalls and hidden costs. You want something that exists today, but can be customised to your needs.”
Bouy also wanted the system to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. He says, “The Salvation Army works with and employs people from all walks of life, so we needed a system suitable for the lowest common denominator. What really sold me about the Netcat CMS was the WYSIWYG interface.”
Implementation
The implementation has not come without its challenges. Bouy says it took one year to identify the product and get the budget funding approved, but the hardest part was the system specifications, which went through several iterations with Netcat over a 9 month period. Work on the customisation began in May 2006 and after thorough testing and bug fixing, the solution was launched on the 20th November 2006, 20 days after the Salvation Army had launched its Christmas Appeal.
Bouy, being a consummate professional, says that while there was pressure to have it ready before the Christmas Appeal, he would have waited even longer if testing required him to do so.
The system is housed on a dedicated web server, with a mirrored fail-over, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world, enabling any registered author to update their content from home, work or overseas.
Training Day
Training, according to Bouy, has been one of the most interesting parts of the implementation. It is also indicative of his success in selecting a system that met his requirements to deliver an intuitive interface for his users. One such user is 72 year old Salvation Army officer Basil Giffard of Kings Meadows, Tasmania.
During the interview Bouy pointed out Giffard’s self-developed website at www.salvationarmy.org.au/kingsmeadows “And you see that man down at the bottom of the page,” he said. “He designed it. He’s 72 and is colour blind. He was absolutely thrilled when some people planning a visit to Tasmania contacted him because they saw his website and want to attend his church. If he can do it, anyone can.”
Word has spread like wildfire amongst the Salvation Army centres about the new system. Since Bouy launched it, 15 centres which had stand alone websites have asked to migrate to the Netcat system for its editing tools and the ability to have multiple authors, reviewers and approvers. Other features such as online subscriptions, blogs, event management and job posting have also been winning points.
Bouy says he has conducted a few training classes on how to build a website using Netcat and has prepared a user manual available via the extranet. Since the majority of people are located in 800 centres across Australia, it has been impossible to personally reach every centre. Bouy says that as people coming forward to use the tool he has established a simple process where he:
1. Identifies authors, reviewers and approvers
2. Sets up access to their web pages
3. Sends them an email with 5 steps to edit the page, and 5 steps to approve it
“It’s been a matter of turning people loose and letting them run with it,” he says. “When they want more details on features, they can access the detailed user manual. When I’ve conducted training classes, people get overwhelmed with all they can do and actually struggle when they go back to their office and try to use it, compared with just giving them five steps and a manual.”
Of course, for those users who do struggle, Bouy and his team are only a phone call away. He has a small team of one full time application programmer managing the Salvation Army’s ecommerce, online shopping and forward planning, a part timer and himself.
Bouy says, “It’s a fairly lean team and you know there are many organisations out there with larger web teams and yet we’re finding Netcat is quite easy to administer, customise and build additional features in.
“We actually have a training team in the IT department who are preparing a more formal regime to train Netcat users, but the majority of users are finding it so easy to jump in and start doing it that this may not be necessary.
“The continual volume of updates of web content made it imperative to give access to staff across Australia before they received training. So far it’s working quite well.”
Power to customise
Bouy says it is quite easy to go into the source code. “For example we built our own login interface which is integrated with our extranet. We’re also working on a podcast wizard, a flash object wizard so people can drop Flash files into a page, and also a Google map wizard. Once we learned the syntax (Netcat uses Borland syntax) which we had not used before, our programmer found it quite easy to customise as we needed. That was a prerequisite so we could avoid having to go back to the vendor.”
The new system also acts as a document and digital asset library, enabling users to share information across the web while protecting it from public access. A favourite feature of the system is the “container objects”, which enable users to drop pre-defined content – such as a “subscription” function or online forms – onto their web page without any knowledge of the programming code that is being used.
Bouy says Netcat provides tools such as Streamcatcher to enable The Salvation Army to map content outside the CMS, such as the donation facility. “This is not in Netcat but its transparent to the users. Streamcatcher also makes the database-generated URLs user friendly.”
He said the capability of Streamcatcher to bypass Netcat to get to other URLs was a deciding factor. Some Salvation Army units want the flexibility to create web pages that do not conform to the same look and feel across the entire site, thus enabling a higher degree of autonomy between different centres, reflected in The Salvation Army’s diffuse site management structure.
Another important criterion was the enterprise license. With 1,400-plus extranet users across the nation, Bouy did not want Netcat access capped at 100 users, or a license for each individual. “Every extranet user is a potential Netcat author.”
So far the system has been rolled out to 150 authors at 45 sites across Australia – from Darwin to Hobart – in just under three months. “We’ve had a very fast uptake, faster than predicted,” says Bouy who is currently getting 2-3 requests per day to use the new system. “At a time when the organisation is centralising more of its operations, this is seen as empowering the people at the grass roots to communicate with their audience over the internet.”