The Newspaper Society case study
Background
The Newspaper Society represents and
promotes the interests of Britain's regional and local press, who
between them own approximately 1,300 daily and weekly, paid-for and
free newspaper titles. It was founded in 1836 and is
believed to be the oldest publishers' association in the world.
Its services are split into three broad areas:
lobbying, marketing and communications. It provides legal
advice and lobbying services to regional newspaper publishers
and their staff, and also to the national newspaper, magazine and
distribution industries. The Newspaper Society also promotes the
regional press as a medium to national advertisers and
agencies. It holds a series of conferences and seminars and
runs the annual Local Newspaper Week.
Requirements
Keeping its members informed is a chief role of the Newspaper
Society and its website is a key tool in doing so. Ensuring the
site is active and efficient is a central task and an effective
content management system can play a vital role in this.
In April 2005 the Newspaper Society conducted a review of its
existing content management system. At that time its website
performance wasn’t fulfilling its main purpose of providing easy
access to all services for its members and the general public. It
was decided that it was time to rebuild the website. The need for a
new content management system was identified in order to enable the
future development of the site. The legacy system was simply too
slow and this was causing vast problems and headaches for the
Newspaper Society.
The main criteria for the new solution included:
- Ability to create and update content quickly
- Provision of essential access to services
It was also important that the new content management system
made it easier to update the website regularly and more than one
person could update without the need to have programming
experience.
Solution
The Newspaper Society conducted a rigorous review of the market
place to evaluate Content Management suites. Following this review
it chose Immediacy’s Content Management Solution.
Immediacy was chosen for a number of reasons but primarily for
its ease of use. Its software is highly inclusive and accessible
for anyone across an organisation, helping to promote a culture of
shared responsibility for updating web content. Immediacy also
offered the best support and the best value for money and was able
to take on board all the information the Newspaper Society
had. Due to the nature of its work the Newspaper Society’s
website is much heavier on text than graphical content and
Immediacy provided all the attributes necessary to aid the
organisation in creating this content quickly and efficiently and
in a way that would be easy to navigate. Modifying content,
receiving approval and publishing it is much faster using Immediacy
CMS.
Another important detail for the Newspaper Society was that the
site needed to have scope for future developments. Immediacy was
able to provide this flexibility with an extensive range of
plug-ins that add enhancements and extra facilities to the
site.
Key results so far:
Since implementing Immediacy’s content management solution the
Newspaper Society has identified several significant improvements
to its website. The solution has made site navigation faster and
easier and provided a better and more satisfactory user experience.
The implementation has been so successful that the Newspaper
Society is looking at further developing its content management
suite and is currently in discussion with Immediacy on how best to
do this.
The Newspaper Society has also noticed increased traffic to its
site since the implementation. The number of visitors to the site
has doubled since going live. In January/February 2006, prior to
the implementation of Immediacy CMS, the average number of page
views was 11,000-12,000. However, after implementation the average
number of page hits increased to 22,000-23,000 and in one week
alone reached an all time high of 30,000 page impressions.
In July 2006, the Newspaper Society was short listed for website
of the year by the Trade Association Forum. “This nomination was a
great achievement and evidence of the many improvements the website
has made over the last number of months,” said Charles Folkes, Web
Manager, The Newspaper Society.
“In order to have a successful website it is important to keep
the content fresh and up to date. As the Newspaper Society
has experienced first hand the more a website caters to the users
needs the more impact it will have as part of the communication
process. Immediacy enables organisations to create content
quickly and efficiently, which in turn improves the customer
experience. ” Nigel Jackson, Co-founder and Chief Executive
Officer, Immediacy.
http://www.newspapersoc.org.uk/