Content management best practices: What we can learn from leaders in education

Today, institutions in the education space must find new ways to attract and engage students and communities. To stay competitive, many organizations are overhauling their digital experience, including how they manage, create, and deliver content. 

A content management system (CMS) is often a central tool in an educational institution’s tech stack. But not all CMSs are the right fit for their specific requirements. 

To get inspired by what’s possible, let’s take a look at how four educational institutions—Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Südtiroler Informatik AG (SIAG), the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Oxford—use Kontent.ai to serve high quality content experiences that make the grade.

A single source of truth drives content consistency and brand trust

Educational content must be geared toward more than just current students. Audiences can include prospective and current students, parents, faculty, and staff; alumni, both active and inactive; and even decision makers from the public. Topics range from recruiting, student services, and academics to actions such as donations, advocacy, publicity, and funding. 

Managing content for hundreds of websites is a mammoth task for universities. For example, content that drives new student registrations is very different from content that enables graduates, promotes research, or serves teams within the university. But one thing must be consistent, no matter the goal or touch point: trust in the brand. 

Up-to-date, accurate, and useful content is one way to protect and even level up your brand. But when websites are built with different solutions—or are managed across different teams—content quality and even compliance with accessibility or university standards can suffer. For The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam), this was the challenge to solve. 

To deliver better content, the university replaced disparate systems with one CMS: Kontent.ai. With all content housed in one repository, the teams have been able to drastically curb the duplication of content and inconsistencies across student, employee, and research-based websites. 

Designing custom, repeatable website “templates” and reusable components in Kontent.ai, VU Amsterdam’s teams can now create new content or websites that are guaranteed to adhere to content guidelines and university requirements. Today, the teams are more nimble and strategic in their content creation, ultimately improving content velocity, consistency, and relevancy. 

• Read VU Amsterdam’s full success story to learn more best practices for designing components that can be used across multiple websites.

Doc-style authoring helps creators publish content with minimal IT involvement

To sustain long-term content velocity and quality, institutions have to set their staff up for success with the right processes and technologies. One aspect of Kontent.ai that educational institutions appreciate is the solid authoring experience in the platform. Collaborative functionality, such as comments, suggestions, versioning, auto-save, simultaneous editing, and AI assistance keeps content creation and feedback in one central place, while assignments and tasks ensure the right stakeholders are involved. 

These days, authors can and should be more picky with their requirements, ensuring their CMS can help them work independently from development and IT teams to manage every step of their content value chain:

• Planning, creating, and reviewing new content easily
• Reusing existing content or creating localized variants
• Previewing how content will look on various channels and devices
• Approving, publishing, and scheduling content faster
• Updating content whenever it is needed
• Auditing content for accuracy and freshness

Let’s take a look at a real world example from Südtiroler Informatik AG (SIAG), the in-house IT services provider for multiple public administration organizations in South Tyrol. They transitioned dozens of schools to a reusable Kontent.ai project. Previously, content was secondary to design, so technical experts were required to manage the sites. Switching to Kontent.ai has put content experts in control, allowing them to create more value for students and teachers. With Kontent.ai, content creators are now publishing content at a faster pace than before. 

• Read Südtiroler Informatik AG (SIAG)’s full success story to explore best practices that help content creators work more independently from their IT teams

Governance improves content operations and the end-user experience

Content governance, the consistent coordination of policies, processes, and resources associated with content, plays a major role in successful content delivery. It’s especially important to have well-defined governance frameworks when:

• Content operations are complex with many contributors involved in the process
• The volume of content and assets in one repository is growing
• Content is presented differently for different audiences, channels, or devices

Let’s dive into a few ways Kontent.ai helps large or distributed teams improve their internal operations to improve the quality of their outputs, using the University of Amsterdam (UvA) as an example. With a community of over 41,000 students and 6,000 staff members, the University of Amsterdam needs to have streamlined communication and access to information. 

In service of this goal, UvA consolidated more than 30 websites into one single student portal, student.uva.nl, a space where students can find everything from course results to university events. 

Previously, students had to navigate to multiple separate websites to find the information they needed. Sometimes, they even tried Google to land on the right site. Google is great for a lot of things, but not this. This approach was proving inconvenient and inaccurate for everyone involved. The university knew it could provide a much sleeker experience for both students and content contributors.

To tackle these challenges, UvA chose Kontent.ai. Centralizing all their content into one place, they then used what are called collections to define areas of access for different users, ensuring only the right contributors can view and modify content relevant to their scope. 

Now, each faculty has its own collection within Kontent.ai, allowing them to maintain control over their materials, without being able to work with content from other faculties. More than 80 users across all faculties now work in Kontent.ai with the right levels of access, keeping content safe and processes organized and governed. 

• Read the University of Amsterdam’s full success story to learn more about the value of solid content modeling.

Workflows speed up production and improve content quality

Well-defined workflows in a content management system can make a real difference not only on content operations, but also on the quality of content delivered. So, what are some best practices for designing workflows that, well, work? 

A big piece of advice we often share with customers is to define specific workflows for specific content types, rather than having a single, standard workflow for all content. Having multiple workflows ensures the right stakeholders are involved in the right processes at the right time. For example, a student life blog post or course description would generally require fewer review steps and participants compared to financial aid policies or admission requirements. Also, different organizational levels will have different governance priorities. 

With Kontent.ai, the University of Oxford has simplified the reviews of research articles, a type of content that often has many reviewers and levels of approval. Using workflows has been a great way to make sure that the content production process in the platform matches their preferred ways of working. 

A smarter way to manage content with Kontent.ai

Having a solution like Kontent.ai opens the door for a wide range of use cases for educational institutions and universities. Want to learn more about how Kontent.ai can support content management for your educational institution? Connect with one of our content experts. And if your organization is part of the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) program, find Kontent.ai as the first enterprise headless CMS on Azure Marketplace.