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Heritage Foundation
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The Organization
Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation (Heritage) is a research and educational institute whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Core audiences that Heritage seeks to reach include Capitol Hill, the executive branch of the government, journalists, state-level think tanks, state governments, donors and the general public.
The Problem
Heritage’s Web site is an important means of reaching their diverse audiences -- but the site needed help.
“Our old Web site was a mish-mash, built over five years with three different redesigns. Our technical staff maintained the site in Dreamwaver, Frontpage, and other tools. There was no structure to the site that made sense,” noted Ted Morgan, Director of Online Communications for The Heritage Foundation. In looking for a solution, Heritage wanted to develop a more consistent ‘look and feel’, to build a database-driven site, and to distribute the responsibility for updating the site to staff across different departments. “We also wanted to make it easier for visitors to find information on our site,” added Morgan. A flexible home page design and improved search capabilities would facilitate easier location of content.
The Solution
Beginning in March 2002, Heritage’s development team evaluated several Web content management tools. “After looking at a number of products, we selected CommonSpot Content Server because it was the best fit for our needs and budget. The more expensive solutions had more horsepower than we needed, and it was clear that CommonSpot could be implemented faster,” said John Hanley, editor for Heritage.
The development team first mocked up the navigation and look and feel for the new site in Adobe Photoshop. Following initial jump-start assistance from PaperThin partner FigLeaf Software, between June and August 2002, Heritage’s in-house team of two Web developers went to work building the site in CommonSpot. Within eight weeks the new site was built. Content contributors (including interns with no HTML experience) were trained in early July, and by the end of August about 50% of the content from the existing site had been uploaded. The remaining 3,000 – 4,000 documents were added by October 2002.
In developing the new site, the Heritage team implemented many of CommonSpot’s out-of-the-box features. The page index element, one of several CommonSpot features that allow content to be re-purposed throughout the site, utilizes metadata to dynamically present content on different pages based on author-defined criteria. Heritage has also deployed CommonSpot’s flexible workflow and approval process as well as content security features, in order to limit who can access content, and utilizing different publishing workflows across the organization depending on the type of content published. In addition to implementing standard features, Heritage developers also extended CommonSpot’s functionality by building and integrating ColdFusion modules to handle custom surveys, polls and other functionality. One example of this was the integration into the site of the Heritage Foundation Tax Calculator. Built by Heritage developers, the calculator cleverly shows the impact of proposed tax legislation. By entering his/her income and a few other bits of information, a visitor to the Heritage site can quickly get an idea of how much money this new tax law will save him/her.
The Return
The team at Heritage noted several tangible benefits achieved by implementing CommonSpot, including improved access to content, staff savings, and faster time-to-Web. The new Heritage site now provides easier access to Heritage’s research, global economic data, policy archives, newsletters, bookstore, events, expert opinions, and a wealth of other content. Content is widely viewed on Heritage’s Web site; on average the site gets between 350,000 and 500,000 unique visitors each month. In addition, implementing CommonSpot has allowed the team at Heritage to post content more quickly and efficiently, saving time and money. Prior to rolling out CommonSpot, Heritage anticipated it would need to add two additional programmers to support the site. However, by enabling non-technical staff to take responsibility for the content, Heritage has actually been able to decrease their staff allocation of HTML programmers by one, resulting in immediate savings.
Currently there are about 18 content contributors, and Heritage is continuing to expand the number of contributors throughout the organization. “We have seen significant efficiencies in the ability to get content published to the Web faster. We don’t have to rely on the technical staff any more to get new reports posted. With thousands of documents, this is a huge time savings,” noted Hanley. “CommonSpot put publishing and editing in the hands of the marketing staff that best know their specific audiences.”
Technology
Hardware: Clustered SQL Server on Dell Dual 1.6 Ghz Processor
Operating System: Windows 2000
Size of Database: Heritage.org 488 MB, Support database - 124 MB
Development Team: Two programmers in house, jump-start training from vendor consultants
Site Information
URL: www.heritage.org
Platform: Windows 2000/NT (MX)
Site Type: Internet
Implementation Partner: Fig Leaf Software
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