Scottsdale improves content management and redesigns website in the name of citizen service

Background

The city of Scottsdale, Arizona, is located just a few miles outside of Phoenix. Voted “Most Livable City” by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Scottsdale is home to nearly 240,000 people. To further its ongoing revitalization projects, the city wanted to improve its website to better serve and inform citizens.

Challenge

Amy Davison, Web Services Manager for the city of Scottsdale, oversees all web services, from public access and intranet sites to email programs and web policies. As the city, its website and its communication needs grew, Davison and her one IT team member faced bottlenecking issues in getting content live and active on the website. Departments would submit updates, information and new content for their respective sites, but with multiple requests coming in each day for the 6,000+ page website, the IT team was not able to publish new content in a timely manner while fulfilling other departmental duties. The IT team and the city’s departments needed make content publishing faster and more streamlined, and empower appropriate personnel to publish content on their own through one common, user-friendly tool.

Solution

“Active Network’s content management solution stood out to us for several reasons,” says Randy Land, Web Services Engineer for the city of Scottsdale. “Active’s system most closely matched our technical environment, it came well within our budget, and the system gave us the greatest flexibility and offered the most compatible platform for customization.”

In addition to selecting the Active Content Management system, the city also needed Active to create a new website design, making its pages easier to read and more navigable for citizens. According to the city, the site looked very governmental and didn’t fully capture Scottsdale’s personality or align very well with the city’s other sites, such as the downtown and tourism sites. It needed to present a mix of the “West’s Most Western Town” with other aspects of the city’s personality, including movement, growth, advancement and luxury.

Also, much of the online photography focused on buildings and architecture around the city rather than the people.

The goal of the new website was to make it easy for citizens and visitors to find information they need, while ensuring that could easily find and update content.

Implementation

Due to the magnitude of the city’s website, implementation and training took several months to complete. Davison notes that a primary success factor for the implementation was participating in a business process review with Active’s team of experts. “Active’s Business Process Review was an important step throughout this project. Active was able to provide its knowledge from past implementations, which made me feel much safer taking on such a big and necessary project for our city.”

The city created an I-Net team comprised of six department representatives who would have the authority and access to publish website content. “Our new content producers range from administrative personnel to police captains and everyone in between,” says Davison.

New I-Net team members must complete a training class prior to independent publishing. Davison leads new members through a half-day training program, discusses workflow processes that are now mapped out, provides online publishing tips, and provides a manual for reference. After comprehensive training, I-Net team members are able to produce and publish content for their respective departments. “The great thing about ACM is that it’s incredibly intuitive,” explains Davison. “Content editing and adding links has been really smooth for all I-Net team members.”

Results

Davison notes that Active’s content management solution has been a springboard to opening departments’ minds about the content available on the web for citizens. “We have stirred the pot in terms of getting our city, departments and personnel all thinking ‘web’ and producing content that will better serve citizens. With more departments thinking about the website and getting involved in the content, we’ve made some great changes. For departments such as the police department, the improved information access and the speed in which online content is now updated has been a huge benefit for citizens.”

Davison is confident that tangible results are not far down the road. “Active’s content management solution has already resulted in time and cost savings. The easier our website is to navigate, the fewer calls we take from citizens and the less time staff members have to spend publishing new content.”

“Active was a great partnership choice for our city,” says Davison. “We definitely felt like we were really supported by Active, especially being such a small IT team. I’m really pleased with the results and changes we’ve experienced both in content management and in the overall look and feel of our site.”

“Active’s content management solution has already resulted in time and cost savings.”

– Amy Davison
Web Services Manager