9 Reasons Your Agency Should Have A CMS

Does it take too long to update and post digital content? Do you lack consistent branding across your website(s)? Is outdated, redundant content leading to a poor customer experience? Does your agency website show up too far down in search results? Are you re-creating the same content for different platforms such as Web or mobile?

A content management system (CMS) can address these issues and significantly improve how your agency delivers and manages digital information—positively impacting your bottom line. If implemented effectively, a CMS can deliver these results across your entire organization:

1. Increased Traffic and Customer Satisfaction

A CMS can help your agency produce more consistent, better content. High-quality content that’s updated frequently can draw more people to your website and increase engagement and customer satisfaction.

2. Faster Delivery of Content

Without a CMS, content updates are often done manually and require support from IT staff to post. Updates take too long or may not happen at all. A modern publishing system allows you to get new content and initiatives online faster, so you can see the benefits sooner.

3. Broader Content Distribution

A goal of the Digital Government Strategy and other open government policies is to make federal government information available anytime, anywhere, on any device. A CMS makes it easier and faster to deliver content via multiple platforms such as Web, social media, mobile devices and apps, and APIs. This increases your reach to new audiences and will help you meet the rising expectations of your customers.

4. Better Quality Control

A CMS enables individual authors across your organization to create content, but access to publish content is restricted to approved people or positions, providing centralized control of online communications across your entire organization.

5. More Searchable Content

A CMS makes it easier to tag content with keywords and other labels and cross-link to related content on your site. This improves search engine optimization, so your content appears higher on search engine results.

6. Increased Content Sharing

A CMS makes it easier to structure and tag content in a standardized way, which enables sharing and re-use of government information—both within and across agencies. This opens up possibilities for agencies to collaborate on related content and deliver a better customer experience to the public.

7. Increased Productivity

A CMS can automate many content management tasks, such as publishing press releases or other recurring content. This can save time and reduce operational errors. A CMS allows your content managers to post the content themselves, speeding up the posting process and eliminating the need for additional technical staff.

8. Improved Site Integrity and Policy Compliance

Improve your agency’s compliance with privacy, security, accessibility, and record-keeping laws with CMS features such as centralized content storage, versioning control, and management controls over content publication. With a CMS, all content is stored in a database with date and time stamps of updates and a history of who made changes.

9. Increased Competitive Advantage

Although federal agencies don’t compete for market share in the same way as private industry, we do compete to deliver relevant and high quality content to the American public on a vast range of topics, from education to the environment to health awareness and jobs. A dynamic, changing website—powered by a CMS—creates the impression of a forward-thinking agency and allows quick responses to emerging issues that affect your mission.