SiteExecutive Success Story: Heldref Publications

Based in Washington, DC, Heldref Publications is the non-profit publishing arm of the Helen Dwight Reid Foundation. Although Heldref’s 40-plus journals and magazines cover a wide range of subjects, they share a common purpose of providing and exchanging research and analysis for the advancement of learning and public policy.

Challenge: In late 2007, Heldref was preparing to re-launch World Affairs (http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org), a quarterly international affairs journal, which, in one form or another, has been published since 1837. Understanding a strong Website would be critical for the magazine’s success, Heldref’s management wanted to find a mechanism for streamlining site creation that would put control into the hands of its editors – as opposed to Web developers.  In addition to creating the new World Affairs site, Heldref’s management was interested in launching new Websites for five other Heldref publications, and enhancing the main Heldref Website, which provides access to the organization’s 40 scholarly journals.

Solution: A team of Heldref marketers and Web development experts evaluated several open source and commercial Web content management solutions before selecting SiteExecutive. As a non-profit, the low cost of open source software was attractive to Heldref. Yet, concern about the effort and resources required for deploying and maintaining an open source CMS negated the initial cost benefits.

In keeping with Heldref’s need for operational efficiency, the organization licensed SiteExecutive as a service (SaaS), and also engaged Systems Alliance’s professional services organization to provide Heldref with information architecture consulting, site design and development, Web content management training and Web hosting services.

With the launch of the World Affairs site, Heldref became the first Systems Alliance customer to go live with SiteExecutive 4. The site leverages several new product features, notably Content Intelligence which Heldref uses for dynamically categorizing content based on topic and author. Once categorized, content is automatically displayed in a section of the site adjacent to each article, providing visitors with an intuitive mechanism for finding relevant content fast.

Heldref is also the first Systems Alliance customer with an end-user community standardized on Macs, which are supported using Firefox with SiteExecutive 4.

>> Click for a .pdf of the entire case study

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org

Client Type
Publisher    
 
Services Delivered
SiteExecutive WCM software
Site design and development
Web hosting
Training
 
Benefits