American Government Agency Case Study
A U.S. Government Agency uses dotCMS to share investigation findings with the public
A U.S. Government Agency partnered with dotCMS to launch a time-sensitive website to share investigation findings with the public.
Industry
Non Profit
Country
United States
Challenge
As a long-term investigation was coming to a close, a U.S. Government Agency needed to develop a public-facing website to share its legal report with the public. Creating a website to present these findings proved challenging, for the website needed to coincide with a scheduled press conference that had an immovable date and time.
Not only did the website have a quick, fixed deadline, but the legal brief was complicated and held a significant amount of data collected over several decades. Despite the involute data set, the agency did not want to hide their findings and knew it was important to make this information public knowledge and accessible to everyone.
Solution
After evaluating several CMS solutions, the American agency chose dotCMS as the right product for this complex implementation. With the agency’s main website already hosted on dotCMS, this choice came in part because of the already successful relationship between the two organizations.
With dotCMS’ multi-tenant functionality, the U.S. agency did not have to start from scratch. They were able to create this new, stand-alone website under the same single software instance being used for the agency’s website already hosted by dotCMS. The CMS solution is designed and engineered to power web properties and allow teams to reuse content, templates, widgets, and assets across all of an organization's sites.
The organization could have chosen any solution, though, but they ultimately believed that dotCMS was flexible enough to fit their needs. dotCMS’ hybrid content management capabilities allowed the agency’s internal team of developers to customize the application while simultaneously leaving room for the nontechnical staff to populate and construct the database needed to build the website content.
Results
The government agency’s legal brief was complex and large, containing several decades of investigation material. With dotCMS, external data, including metadata, can be imported via the back-end and manually exported. The product’s flexible knowledge management enhanced cross-team collaboration between technical and nontechnical teams, making it faster to import the legal report’s data.
Using multi-site features, any documentation, articles, images, and other data relating to the agency’s original and new website were all held within one centralized platform. These content items were grouped into content types that were then used to create templates and page layouts, making the website development fast and seamless. They were also able to assign geographical attributes to different pages and datasets using dotCMS’s workflow feature.
The American. agency knew from the beginning that it was essential to make their legal brief accessible to all constituents, regardless of the complex information being shared. dotCMS’ best practices and compliance capabilities made this possible through the help of smart UI design to improve the website experience for all visitors. Some of these solutions involved using the legal report to create more digestible imagery to show data and information through graphs and charts.
The agency only had a short, fixed period to get this implementation up and running. They had a scheduled press conference to share the findings of their investigation with the public, and the launch of this new website successfully went live on the same date and time as the conference. This timely feat was made possible by the collaboration between the government agency and dotCMS’ teams, all making flexible changes to the implementation until days before it went live.
On the first day the website was available to the public, over 31,000 visitors spent an average of over 5 minutes on the site and downloaded over 7,000 documents. Today, the site continues to receive high traffic and has been visited by users from more than 127 countries.
