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The search for simplicity and complexity – an impossible aim?

Download the Royal College of Nursing case study .pdf

The organisation:

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has been the voice of nursing across the UK since 1916, and is now the largest professional union of nursing staff in the world with 400,000 members. The RCN promotes the interest of nurses and patients on a wide range of issues and helps shape healthcare policy by working closely with the UK Government and other national and international institutions, trade unions, professional bodies and voluntary organisations.

The RCN’s membership is widely dispersed across all parts of the UK placing a great deal of importance on the organisation’s website in reaching members and delivering resources, support, networking and knowledge sharing opportunities. Now recognised as an indispensable facility, which currently holds more than 65,000 pages of specialist content, the RCN is working hard to further develop the opportunities the site can provide and to enhance the efficiency of its administration.


The challenge: The search for simplicity and complexity – an impossible aim?

When the RCN embarked on a journey to develop its website, it had two key challenges to fulfil. The first was to consolidate the site’s existing content in one place, secondarily it had to devolve responsibility for creating content from its central web team to a network of local editors based across the UK; most of whom had limited prior technical and web expertise. The decision was made to select a content management solution, but it came with a clear caveat that any system would need to be flexible and scaleable enough to allow for future development of functionality.

Historically the RCN’s site was managed by a central web team, which existed mainly to facilitate the publication of content. Content was provided by email from staff at the organisation’s nine regional offices and transferred onto the site by the web team. “Essentially we had highly trained programmers cutting and pasting content into the website,” explained Leon Hughes, Web Manager for the RCN. “We needed to find a way to free up our programmers time and improve the dynamism and administration of content as well as improving member input  - as we now have more than 400,000 members in our trade union.

“We also identified that our members have very different needs from each other and we wanted to address that. Primarily we recognised they would benefit from more social networking at a local level and interaction and exchange of information between specific groups rather than the network as a whole,” Leon explained. “A content management system was one of the easiest ways for us to meet all those requirements, so we started looking.”

The solution: Strong at the core yet flexible with it…

The RCN web team thoroughly audited the CMS market and benchmarked products according to their flexibility, functionality and cost. The team looked beyond the usual global players and even turned to Australia for inspiration. “The CMS market is very regional and we wanted to see what was working elsewhere,” said Leon. “After a long time searching, we eventually came across MySource Matrix Content Management System from Squiz. The main attraction of the product was that it was open source and we liked the opportunities that presented to us. The product clearly had great core functionality, but the option for us to further develop it to our needs without any financial or vendor constraints was very attractive. It wasn’t just another off-the-shelf product, but a living, consistently developing tool.”

The Squiz approach: Like nothing else on the market!

“Right from the outset, Squiz was very keen to understand the business and meet our specific needs. They understood what we wanted to do and supported us in that” said Leon. “If you deal with a corporate vendor they will usually have an area of specialism and they’re very keen to stick to that and give you their off-the-shelf solution. Even if Squiz hasn’t got a particular off-the-shelf functionality, the team are always very helpful in enabling us to configure the system to let us do what we want. It’s a very unique model.”

“The other major players based their efforts too much around pre sales and the post sales support was lacking. Squiz’ business model is geared towards long-term business retention and not just securing a one-off payment upfront. This is much more suited to the not-for-profit and government sectors because we like to work in partnership,” said Leon.

The result: Dynamic content and outstanding functionality

With some 65,000 pages of existing content on the RCN’s website, the two teams joined forces to carefully plan the architecture, design and implementation strategy for MySource Matrix and the massive migration of content that would be required.

Leon explained the situation: “Right now we’re migrating information into the system and developing new functionality and facilities, but come October we will have all the content in the system and we will be ready to launch. By that time we will also have facilitated several hundred online communities to participate in blogging and knowledge sharing activities with tools like Wickies (online reference tools), plus our editors will be able to edit and administer a whole range of content types including audio visual material and podcasting.”

The new site will also have a central members database that Leon says they have created in-house using APIs. “Members can now interact directly with the database through the website. In the event that someone gets married or changes their name or address they can update their details online.”

He goes on to talk about additional functionality that the team has already delivered. “We never imagined we’d be able to do so much with the system. Members can now carry out online transactions on the site; you can join the RCN or renew memberships, buy publications, and book events. All of this is facilitated through the new CMS system.”

Feedback so far has so far been overwhelmingly positive with 95 per cent of users and developers saying that they are happy with it, especially the RCN’s web and IT teams who are enjoying the opportunity to develop functionality rather than administering content. “The wider editorial community is very dependant on what kind of things they’ve been used to previously,” said Leon. “If they’re regular IT users (using a computer on a daily basis) the reaction has been really positive. A few people have been a little scared when first introduced to the concept of CMS because they think they will break something and cause horrific damage. Once they’ve been shown the safeguards they’re more confident and really like the system. What they really like is being able to see the changes they make on a live site. It gives them another skill,” he said.

“It’s important to point out that we’ve been able to do all this without any of the users having to go on any huge learning curves or any web training programmes,” Leon concluded.

The future:

“The keystone that underpins everything, and the reason why we’ve been able to achieve what we have so far is because of the strength and flexibility of the MySource Matrix product,” said Leon. “We never imagined we’d be able to do so much with it. Consequently that presents us with plenty of scope for the future development and continuing progression of this very valuable resource.”