Postal heritage and Plone, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Content Management Systems is one of the most powerful and well-written nonprofit technology case studies I've ever read.   The fact that it's about Plone is almost an afterthought.  Almost. ;-)

It starts with the client's story -- a unfortunately-too-typical nonprofit story.  Steve Gardam, web manager for The British Postal Museum & Archive, explains:

The website content was reviewed in June 2004, and we found many small content errors. This became a bigger problem, as it emerged that the previous ‘friendly’ arrangement to update content was no longer possible, as Royal Mail Group [their former parent organization] had outsourced its ICT. The high cost of editing content meant that the site was to stagnate for several months. Perhaps it was a blessing that were we also unable to obtain website visitor statistics during this time!

After a RFP process (that's ITT -- or Invitation To Tender -- in Her Majesty's English), they chose Adaptive Technologies Limited (ATL).

We found ATL’s responses to our queries measured and open. We also felt that they had the greatest understanding of the heritage sector, perhaps because they are themselves owned by a charitable trust and are based in a Regency heritage centre, in Brighton.

We liked the fact that ATL’s solution suggested using open-source software (Plone) for the CMS, as we were wary of getting tied in to a company-specific system. There were no real differences in price between the companies, because they all tailored their solutions to the ballpark budget we stated. Our choice was based on the overall approach of each company to working with us, and I’m pleased to say we have made a good decision.

Two things jump out at me here:

1) Nonprofits like to work with nonprofit consultancies -- because there's a cultural fit that leads to greater trust, and greater understanding of nonprofit problems.

2) Open-source solutions lead to consultants that have an open, collaborative attitude, and that's what wins contracts -- assuming open-source can make the price.  Which in my experience, it usually can.

Skipping over the (very good) bits about project management and timeline management, we come to their experience with Plone-the-tool:

Learning to use the CMS was initially a very frustrating experience, but no different than learning any new ICT application. For example, when using the WYSIWYG editor, copying in text from Word documents can sometimes lead to muddled formatting, but this is something that is learned, anticipated, and then becomes less of a difficulty.

The system becomes increasingly intuitive with practice, and the user interface is logical, with options to view, edit and publish pages. We have built a publishing workflow into the CMS, enabling authors to create content and publishers to review and publish. Thus far, we have not rolled out the CMS to a wide number of staff, but our site, like our organisation is relatively small.

Things to be wary of...

The logic of the interface has occasionally proven to be a false friend. For example, the content is arranged in folders containing documents and flies, much like Windows Explorer (WE). However, the behaviour of the CMS folder structure is not a perfect analogy for WE, which I nearly learnt the hard way when I cut out some data and was unable to paste it back – happily ATL was able to rescue the missing content. ATL have promised several improvements to the system that we hope to include in an upgrade later in 2005.

The CMS ran very slowly to begin with, but ATL acknowledged this and worked on it to improve the speed. Having spoken with colleagues who use different CMSes, our Plone CMS now runs at a rate they would consider typical, if not better.

The story could have ended right there.  But then Steve passes the mic to the consultant, Danny Hope, lead designer and project manager for Adaptive Technologies Limited.

It appears that this was ATL's first Plone site.  Danny explains the rationale for choosing Plone instead of rolling his own solution:

For some time I had been researching the requirements for a new CMS that I would design, and that the ATL in-house team would build. My new CMS would be a universally accessible and usable vision of beauty, capable of letting anybody edit any website quickly and easily, it would be perfect… I felt this was within ATL's very strong capabilities, until I discovered Plone. I was so impressed by what Plone could offer that I abandoned the idea of a new CMS, and decided to join the open source movement.

Smart move. ;-)

Danny then describes the modifications they made to Plone, and more importantly, the process of listening to the client to identify their needs:

Although Plone is a very powerful and up-to-date system, our experience of working with end-users indicated that Plone's 'out-of-the-box' editing interface could be improved, particularly in terms of usability. With this in mind, our development team tested and implemented a number of significant changes. These now provide an easy-to-use CMS for the BPMA and a better version of Plone for us to offer other clients in the future.

As well as these general enhancements, we also wanted to ensure that the CMS was suited to the BPMA's actual working practices (CMSes tend to fail when they force organisations to make unpopular changes to their working practices). To do this we conducted on-site interviews with BPMA staff to gain an understanding of how they would use the system; studying their working practices, understanding their expectations for the CMS, and analysing how its introduction was likely to affect the organisation.

This study led us to remove unnecessary or overly complicated features and add a number of custom tools to the system. We also used our analysis to configure Plone's built-in workflow mechanism to suit the BPMA's working practices, reducing resistance to the introduction of the CMS by making it friendlier to use.

I would love to hear (and see) more about these "usability enhancements", especially on the back end.  The public site looks very clean and streamlined. 

OK, I've probably rambled on long enough.  But with a Plone Symposium tutorial about "Nonprofits and Plone" to prepare for, I need all the great stuff like this I can get.

No, seriously, not only is this a great testimonial for Plone that takes into account Plone's strengths and weaknesses, it's also a great lesson in effective technology management practices for nonprofit organizations.

Way to go British Postal Museum & Archive and Adaptive Technologies Limited!

PS Their colophon is a thing of beauty.  It's even got Flash movies that demonstrate Plone.  Wow.