By Jeff Herron and Usha Venkatachallam

Do you dream of a website with up-to-the-minute information? It's likely within your reach. Jeff Herron and Usha Venkatachallam of Beaconfire Consulting map out the landscape of Content Management Systems that can allow non-technical staff to update websites.

Do you dream of a website that contains timely and compelling stories about your organization but dread the site updates that would entail? Do you wish for a list of all your organization’s upcoming events, searchable libraries of resources, a place to highlight all your photos, or just a correct listing of all your board members?

If so, your organization is probably ready for a Content Management System – a CMS.

CMSs are software tools that allow non-technical users to update the text, images, and documents on a website without having to learn to use HTML code. Using a Web browser or a desktop software package, users access, edit and upload content changes to a website using the familiar text editing commands found in software like MS Word. CMS solutions are increasingly popular to simplify website management.

Nonprofits use CMSs for different reasons. Smaller nonprofits often want to allow non- technical staff to update and manage the content on its website. Larger nonprofits hope to build resource libraries, share content between national and chapter websites, or allow many authors and editors to collaborate on website content. All nonprofits can benefit from CMS features that find and display the right text and images for a page based on rules, automatically remove expired content, show the same content on different sections of the site or even different websites, or allow multiple people to edit and approve website content.

If a CMS sounds like it might be helpful for you, there is good news -- there are many good options for both simple tools and powerful ones. But that’s the bad news as well: there are so many options that it can be difficult to choose one.

We’re here to help. This article is intended to provide a starting point and to make your search for the right CMS easier and more focused.

The CMS Landscape at 10,000 Feet

CMS software continues to mature, with many interesting and relatively powerful low-cost solutions. Simple webpage management solutions like Macromedia Contribute are becoming more polished and gaining traction among those with simple needs. Most of the progress is happening with database-driven CMS tools which are rapidly maturing and falling in cost. The overall CMS landscape consists of a number of types of tools including:

• WYSIWYG tools.  A complex abbreviation for a simple concept: “What You See Is What You Get”.  These tools allow you to edit each website page individually, just as you would in a program like Microsoft Word, but they don’t offer most of the other CMS features described above.

• Open Source software. Open Source refers to software that is developed by a community and is open for use, reuse and customization by users with fewer restrictions than proprietary or closed software. This software can usually be downloaded and installed with little or no licensing cost, but often requires more technical skill to install and configure than other types of CMSs.

• Application Service Providers.  Software that is leased on a monthly or annual contract and is intended to work “out of the box”. These tools are also marketed as “hosted”, “on demand” or “software as a service” depending on the buzz word of the month.

• Installed products. The most familiar model, which requires license fees to acquire and install, and can entail some effort to configure despite “out of the box” sounding sales brochures. The range of license fees runs from several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, although costs are dropping rapidly, particularly at the low end of the market.

Open source tools are evolving from tools designed for techies to feature rich programs suitable for non-technical users. At the same time, the prices for mid-market installed CMS products are dropping to be within the reach of more nonprofits.  Additionally, some of these vendors are now offering their software products as a service you can lease, which lowers the up front cost and makes these more robust solutions accessible to a wider range of organizations.

The CMS Landscape from 500 Feet

WYSIWYG tools
WYSIWYG, or “What You See Is What You Get” software tools are not always included in the content management arena. However, they can be a good solution for managing simple websites. These tools, including Macromedia Contribute, Macromedia DreamWeaver, Microsoft FrontPage, and Adobe GoLive, display an editable version of your website and allow you to update or create text and images just as you would in a program like Microsoft Word.

These tools are generally fairly easy to use, fairly quick to setup even for an existing website, and allow a great deal of flexibility over the graphic design and layout of a page. Better yet, the price is right: nonprofits can typically purchase this software for well under a hundred dollars per license, though a license is required for each desktop machine that will be used to update the website (for most CMSs you’ll only need one license per web site or per server running the CMS software).

The downside is that WYSIWYG tools have substantial limitations compared to the other software listed here. The other categories of tools store your content in a database and thus have a lot of power to organize information for you, display it in multiple places on the site, and show content based on editorial rules. WYSIWYG tools, on the other hand, generally store your text and information in the webpage itself, as if each webpage were a separate MS Word document. If information shows up in multiple places in the site or quickly goes out of date, managing it through one of these tools can become a tedious and error-prone chore.

WYSIWYG tools are great for making simple updates to sites with a limited numbers of pages or that don’t change often. But if you are ready for more than a basic website, read on!

Open Source CMS
There are several types of open source tools and technologies that can serve as a website management solution. The leading open source CMS tools started out as online community engagement tools that include web page editing along with engagement tools like forums, blogs, polls, surveys and other interactive features. In the last few years, these systems are successfully maturing into useful content management tools as well. In addition to making content editing easier for non-technical users, these tools allow content to be displayed dynamically based on editorial rules, and enable organizations to separate content from their site’s design. Unlike a few years ago, these tools generally won’t substantially restrict graphic design and layout. Drupal, CivicSpace, Joomla, Mambo, Plone, eZ publish and TYPO3 are well-known open source CMS options.

Sometimes blogs or wiki tools are used as CMS solutions for simple sites because they are so easy to use. MoveableType and WordPress are well known blog tools that are commonly used for web management. Wikipedia, the popular online and collaboratively developed encyclopedia, is powered by a wiki tool called MediaWiki. MediaWiki and Confluence are popular wiki tools that are sometimes used as a CMS for collaborative publishing sites.

Before you decide that an open source tool is for you, there’s an important question to ask yourself: Do you have a staff member or volunteer with significant technical and web design skills? To succeed with an open source tool, you’ll need a tinkering techno-geek – someone who’s willing to spend some time installing, configuring, and perhaps even coding in the CMS. While open source software is generally available for free, without up-front licensing costs, it does not remove other associated costs like design, implementation, and hosting. Fortunately there are many hosting services that offer open source software as part of the hosting package (including ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and patches), which can make the open source option feasible even for small organizations without an IT department.

On the downside, some open source tools still lag behind comparable commercial CMS software in content administration ease of use, so it’s important to understand your staff’s skills. And be wary of the open source tools’ customization and extension possibilities. While this can be a huge benefit if your needs are truly unique, writing custom code just to improve usability or add common features will quickly wipe out any up front cost savings from the absence of a license fee.

The key to picking the right tool is to do your homework before making the decision. For open source tools, you can compare different solution specs and even test drive many CMSs at http://www.opensourcecms.com/. Other considerations for open source tools include:

• Technology adoption. Different CMSs are written in different languages, some more common than others.  It is easier to find PHP developers to customize PHP tools like Drupal or Joomla than to find Python programmers to customize Plone. 

• Viability of the development community.  Check on the development team’s track record with prior "product” releases by browsing some of the support forums to check if there are both newbies and helpful seasoned developers.

Application Service Providers
ASP or hosted solutions are increasingly popular as a way to get a full featured CMS without the headache of buying, installing and maintaining complex software. These vendors provide web based CMS tools for your use for a monthly or annual service fee.

Given the simple marketing message, the success of corporate vendors like Salesforce.com (which provides an ASP constituent management solution) and the explosion of nonprofit sector vendors, hosted CMS solutions are increasingly popular. The hosted CMS market includes a number of vendors who provide content management software as their core business, such as WebSideStory (formerly Atomz), CrownPeak, and Clickability. There are other vendors that provide CMS as part of a suite of software tools – see the eCRM section below.

Vendors of installed products are also increasingly offering a hosted version of their tool, thus reducing installation and management complexities. Commercial vendors that offer a hosted version of their CMS include HotBanana, and CitySoft.

Hosted CMS software may be of particular interest to organizations that are looking to get a site up in a short period of time (perhaps the site is for a campaign or short-term project). They can also be a good fit if your website needs are fairly basic and can be covered by “out of the box” capabilities. In these cases, a hosted option may reduce the needed setup and configuration. However, if you have unique requirements, the preconfigured nature of most ASPs can be a downside: there is rarely much flexibility for customization. Also consider the nature of your budget. If it’s easier to allocate a monthly subscription cost than a larger upfront cost, you should consider hosted options.

In order to find the right hosted CMS, ask vendors to demo their software for you so that you can compare your needs against what the tool offers. Many vendors will also provide you access to a demo site, allowing you to judge the content administration interface for yourself.

eCRM with CMS
If you would like to use your site primarily to communicate with constituents by email, raise money, influence legislation or generally get your constituents to take action, you should consider tools that provide both CMS and eCRM (electronic Constituent Relationship Management) features.

Many eCRM tools provide basic content management capability which can meet many organizations’ needs. However, organizations that have unique, information rich, interactive, or publishing-based sites may find the basic content management offered by these tools limiting. They are not primarily focused on CMS but rather on eCRM capabilities to drive fundraising, actions and membership. There are a number of benefits associated with having integrated CMS and eCRM capabilities, but it is not a necessity for a successful Web site.

In this category, there are a handful of eCRM vendors/tools that also have CMS capabilities. The leading vendors, Convio, GetActive, and Kintera, have CMS offerings that continue to mature. Other tools like Democracy in Action, Orchid Suites, and Antharia’s fortyfourfish provide a combination of CRM and some CMS capabilities and could be options for less complex needs.

Installed Software
The category of installed products is the largest and most diverse, with everything from evolved home grown software solutions to products from market leading software corporations. These tools have license costs that range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The good news is that with the emergence of viable and maturing open source solutions and the explosion of hosted solutions, licensing costs for installed products are coming down and there are plenty of options in the low- to mid- range.

Installed products as a group typically offer the most mature features and polished solutions. Because the software is installed on your own servers, installed solutions (and open source tools) offer more integration options for connecting your CMS to other applications and data used on your website. Good products in this category offer built in customization capabilities that ensure that the site meets your current requirements, while still preserving the ability to upgrade to the next version of the software.

Ektron CMS400 is a solid, low cost solution (less than $5,000) that is rich in features and provides a good value compared to even the most mature open source products. Mid-range tools which cost $10,000 to $50,000 include HotBanana, CommonSpot, Ingeniux, and Serena Collage. The upper mid-range solutions, including RedDot, Percussion, Stellent, and FatWire, cost upwards of $50,000 and are appropriate for large organizations with complex needs.

How to Decide on a CMS?

So how do you make sense of the choices?  Start with a review of your needs – both the actual website feature requirements and your business, technical and vendor needs:

• Website information. What information would you like to be able to update?  How will it be arranged on your site?  Will information be shared across many pages or even sites?

• Workflow. Who will need to be involved in the updates?  Will multiple people need to contribute to or approve changes?

• Interactive features. What do you want to enable your site visitors to do? How will users interact with the information or with each other?

• Cost.  What are the license fees?  Monthly or yearly fees?  How much will you need to pay for the technical infrastructure such as servers, database licenses, or third party software?  How much for training and support?

• Budget. What can you afford to spend on the project? What can you spend up front? In the months or years to come?

• Timeline. How quickly will you need the solution in place?  And for how long does it need to last?

• Staff skills and capacity. Do you have staff with technical, editorial, or design skills?  If so, what skills do they have?  How much time will they be able to devote?

• Technology preferences.  Have you standardized on a particular set of vendors? Do you prefer in-house or outsourced systems and support?

• Integration and data exchange. Can you use this system with your other software, like your donor database? Can you pass data from one system to the other?

• Vendor factors.  Is the organization behind the CMS viable?  Can it provide good references, customer support, and a history of upgrades and improvements?  Will it be a good partner? Does it embrace your values? Do you feel comfortable working with this vendor?

With a clear understanding of your needs and priorities, you’ll need to research your software options. When you have a sense of what might work for you, compare features, ask vendors for demos, or, better yet, just try the systems out for yourself.

Unfortunately, we can’t just tell you which system will work best for you.  The key is to determine your organization’s specific needs and then seek out a good fit.  But there are a lot of good tools out there that will enable you to manage those timely and compelling stories about your organization, events listings, and searchable libraries.  With some effort into research and comparison, you can find a CMS to help you build the website of your dreams. 

Jeff Herron is a co-founder of Beaconfire and the principal consultant who leads the delivery team. As part of his client work, Jeff serves as the liaison for evaluations of technology available to nonprofits in the marketplace. Jeff has led Beaconfire on dozens of client initiatives including projects for Heifer International, Human Rights First, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Alzheimer's Association. He has also been a featured speaker on Internet issues and Web development strategies, presenting to associations and other nonprofits at the national and regional levels.

Usha Venkatachallam serves as a Solutions Architect at Beaconfire, helping clients objectively evaluate and creatively apply Internet technologies. Her role also includes leading the technical team in configuring, developing, and implementing online solutions and tools for content management, fundraising, advocacy, and email marketing. She has worked with innovative organizations such as Heifer International, Human Rights First, Oxfam America, and Planned Parenthood Federation.

Andrew Cohen, Eric Eckl, Ted Fickes, Ryan Ozmiek, and Laura Quinn also contributed to this article.

© copyright Idealware 2006

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