Heartland Institute

Services Delivered:

• SiteExecutive WCM software
• Application Development
• MediaExecutive video management service
• Training
• Web hosting

Benefits:

• Eliminate Web content publishing bottleneck
• Expand content authoring community
• Streamline video management and distribution
• Enable effective content organization and browsing
• Improve efficiency of Web operations
• Boost site security and availability

Challenge:

The Heartland Institute is a Chicago-based not-for-profit research and education organization. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. In recent years, the organization’s Website has become an increasingly important conduit for sharing information with thousands of individuals and politicians – its sites average more than 400,000 visitors per month. To sustain its growth, Heartland needed to address several challenges:

• Expand pool of content contributors, but ensure site and content quality
• Manage growing volumes and complexity of content and enable efficient access by site visitors
• Prevent malicious attacks on the site, ensuing operational / brand integrity and availability

Solution:

Heartland evaluated several highly regarded CMS applications, but ultimately chose SiteExecutive for the following reasons:

• Ease of use – decision makers at Heartland preferred the SiteExecutive user interfaces to competing products.
• Content governance and quality – SiteExecutive has a configurable approval workflow, version control, content roll-back and auditing for all user interactions.
• Extensibility – the Heartland team had developed Web apps using ColdFusion and SQL Server. Systems Alliance offered a detailed plan for migrating Heartland’s existing content and apps into SiteExecutive.
• Secure hosting platform – Systems Alliance provides secure Web hosting services with service level agreements and support aligned with Heartland’s availability requirements.

In addition to SiteExecutive and Web hosting, Heartland has also turned to Systems Alliance for help with enhancements to its “Policy Bot” application, and for the MediaExecutive online video service.

Heartland has a growing collection of audio and video files and needed a mechanism for organizing content and delivering it through Heartland Web properties – in addition to YouTube and other third-party sites. With MediaExecutive, Heartland retains complete control over its online video content and can easily add videos to any page on its Websites. Like its Website, MediaExecutive is hosted by Systems Alliance, which provides Heartland with SLAs for video availability and performance, ensuring an optimal viewing experience for Heartland’s site visitors.

“SiteExecutive has greatly enhanced the effectiveness of Heartland’s Web presence,” said Diane Bast, executive editor, Heartland Institute. “Its ease of use and content governance capabilities let our subject matter experts create, manage and deliver content with little or no technical support – helping us keep site visitors engaged and informed.”

“We’re also very pleased with the quality of service we get from Systems Alliance. From custom development and Web hosting to the SiteExecutive support desk – and now MediaExecutive – they consistently deliver on their commitments. The transition from our previous site to SiteExecutive was a big job, and the Systems Alliance team made it happen smoothly and effectively. We suspect no job is too big for SA, and we strongly recommend them.”