"As a non-profit organization with a strong commitment to our mission, we were seeking an enterprise-level solution that was also in line with our budgetary goals. CrownPeak provided the highest degree of quality and customization at the lowest cost of ownership. For us, outsourcing our CMS was the only reasonable decision, since it has meant minimal strain on our internal staff and is well within the constraints of our budget."

Loren Blackford
Director of Knowledge Sharing

Summary
The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) needed a way to create and manage the content on their public site, their intranet their research library archive, and 40 field office sites. LISC chose CrownPeak’s Advantage Content Management System (CMS) because it provided a rapidly implemented solution with the flexibility and depth of functionality to meet all their challenges. The results included vastly improved access to information for internal staff, field workers, and the general public - with a predictable, ongoing, low total cost of ownership.

Client
Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) provides grants, loans and equity investments to Community Development Corporations (CDCs) for neighborhood redevelopment. LISC is a national non-profit organization with a strong commitment to mission. Because the benefit LISC provides is executed at the local level through its 40 program offices, LISC maintains a community-based, highly distributed website.

Challenge
LISC’s content management needs were systemic; they had to manage the content on their public site (including a sizeable research library), and they wanted to provide relevant, easily accessible content to their internal employees over their intranet. Additionally, LISC needed to be able to rapidly create mini-sites for each of their forty program offices around the country that would allow each office to have its own identity. These sites would be maintained through the a single content management system by staff in offices around the country. Because LISC has a small IT team focused on core business issues, they needed to partner with a company that could provide the development, design, implementation, maintenance and training for the new system; in other words, they needed a zero-effort, turnkey solution.

Solution
CrownPeak and LISC charted a four-phase implementation plan for Advantage CMS, completing each phase in one to two week increments. Initially, CrownPeak implemented Advantage CMS for a specific area of LISC’s public site for which they needed immediate help, the resource library, a source of critical information for LISC’s customers. Within Advantage CMS, LISC can create multiple content types in a single content repository, thereby streamlining content creation. To assist with the structuring of LISC’s growing information set, Advantage CMS allows for the creation of multi-tiered indexes of content, which then dynamically populate the site’s navigation. Thus, LISC can quickly and efficiently add new sections of content, without needing to restructure their site. In the second phase, Advantage CMS was extended to manage LISC’s entire intranet, slightly redesigning the site for easier use and navigation. Prior to completing the implementation of the rest of the public site, CrownPeak extended Advantage CMS to create sites for LISC’s forty individual program areas, implementing it’s powerful "model" capability so that LISC administrators can simply click on a "New Program Area" button and create an entire collection of pages and templates in one step. By dragging and dropping content from Word, DreamWeaver, or most other common editing tools, LISC can now have an entire new web site for any new program area live in a matter of minutes.

Innovation
The implementation of Advantage CMS for LISC provided turnkey, content management for internal staff, branch offices, and customers, covering all aspects of LISC’s corporate web-based communication. To accommodate the broad user base within LISC, the system can be partitioned to allow each group of users to see and manage only their own content, while allowing administrators at LISC to report and audit against the entire system in a single location. CrownPeak’s site builder approach for the field offices has been of particular benefit to LISC, as they have been able to create sites for every LISC location in record time.

Return on Investment
LISC has enjoyed the benefits of CrownPeak’s Advantage CMS in several ways:

• The overall cost of Advantage CMS was significantly less than implementing separate systems, custom developing a system, or modifying a package to cover three separate functions. A CrownPeak implementation averages 12%-40% of the cost of other solutions over three years.
• The rapid time to implementation saved LISC countless hours that they were spending each month to update their public site and their intranet.
• CrownPeak’s ability to rapidly create and replicate program area sites saved LISC the cost of 40 site designs.
• The ability for LISC to manage and modify image-based navigation within the system could not have been addressed by other content management solutions. With Advantage CMS, LISC does not have to create new HTML every time they add a new section or link to their site.