Journey Church

These are suggested steps to research Content Management System options for your church. They can take you from knowing nothing about CMS to final vendor and product selection. Even if you are replacing a CMS with a new tool, you should follow these steps in the CMS lifecycle.

Some steps require a lot of reading and study. You may not have the time or inclination, but again, you will know what you skipped.

If you are a larger church, you may hire consultants to do some or all of these steps for you. Just insist that they document how they covered each step of the way, and get them to put the results in your hands.

 

Step 1. Organize Your Content. This means getting the staff who now manage your content to inventory and structure it. It needs to be categorized and labelled, arranged well for navigation, and perhaps indexed and abstracted to support searching. If you don't know the content workflow (who's doing what, what some call your business processes) beforehand, a CMS is more likely to be a problem than a CM solution.

 

Step 2. Search The Web. This is the least expensive step and the most powerful. And once you learn what is out there, you will use it over and over in the steps below.

 

Step 3. Articles are free, books range from $20 to just under a hundred dollars. If you bought them all, it would still be a tiny investment compared to most consulting fees and the license fees for any proprietary CMS. You will need the time to read them, or assign a couple of trusted people to read them and be your advisors.

Step 4. Industry Analyst Reports. They will assess company viability and also technology trends that point to newer CM techniques and CMS tools that implement them. (see ChurchTechReviews Church CMS List and Great Church Website Content Management Vendor List)

 

Step 5. Trade Shows No single content management trade show is a must for all the industry players, but they provide a chance for you to talk to the companies and see demonstrations of their latest products. Speakers will often provide an overview of the technology you are considering. Costs are usually several hundred dollars, and if you travel you could spend thousands of dollars for a 3-day show.

 

Step 6. Vendors Directly approaching the vendors costs only your time.

 

 

Step 8. Demonstration Systems. Whether it's a canned online demo, or an interactive "sandbox" (where you can upload your own content for testing), these are free opportunities to learn the interface and toolset you may be living with for some years. You should get the people now managing your content to test drive the system, instantiating your content workflow, and get their "buy-in" to its capabilities.

 

Step 9. First cut. You should limit the number of systems to two to five at most.

 

Step 10. Prototype Sites with Your Content. Serious vendors who make the cut will probably agree to build you a prototype site with some of your content running. If it is a really high-end system, they may want to be paid for this step. If you are looking at seven-figure license fees, these charges may be justified. Far too many companies have invested millions of dollars in a CMS that went unused once the content managers realized its limitations. If you can afford it, this step should include stress and performance testing to make sure it can handle your traffic levels.

 

Step 11. Timetables and Milestone Agreements. These will vary with the size of your organization, the amount of content to be managed, whether it is a migration of existing content or a new build, etc. You should ask the vendors and consultants to provide examples of timetables for similar installations. Take these timetables seriously. Many failures are traceable to lack of realism in assessing the time and energy needed to bring up a CMS.

 

Step 12. Final Selection. You are nearly there. Just remember that choosing the right CMS cannot be done from any number of its (claimed) features. A CMS is right and the features are real when your organization is using it every day. A CMS is only 20% purchased software and hardware. It is 80% the process of people using the tools to implement a content management strategy.