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> Clients > Case Studies > CityPass Newsletter and Content Management System
CityPass Newsletter and Content Management System
Interchange and Database Development for a complete content management system that allows for the easy creation of website-integrated newsletters for both end customers and company affiliates.
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» Visit the CityPass Website
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The Situation
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CityPass requires a close, ongoing relationship with museums, theaters, and other organizations in its destination cities. CityPass wanted an electronic newsletter system that would improve its ability to manage these relationships and keep their business affiliates better informed. While initially focused on the affiliate relationships, the newsletter system also needed to be expandable to allow for other newsletters for customers. The system not only needed to be simple to manage, but the newsletters themselves needed to integrate with the CityPass website in order to be displayed through the site and allow the company to use dynamically-changing opt-in mailing lists in its existing database.
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End Point's Solution
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While good, complete, existing newsletter and mailing list systems are available, such systems would not integrate cleanly with the existing website. Because of this and other specific requirements, CityPass needed a customized content management solution. The project was divided into six major areas: (1) a core content management system (CMS) capable of rendering dynamic, multi-format content; (2) a safe email delivery system; (3) a mailing list management system; (4) newsletter templating; (5) job control and scheduling for the release of new issues; and (6) an administrative interface for integrating and managing the entire system.
Since CityPass's site runs on the Interchange application server with a PostgreSQL database, End Point leveraged the unique abilities of each tool to produce a flexible, efficient content management system that would make the creation of new newsletter issues fast and easy, requiring no programming knowledge and little to no knowledge of HTML to use effectively. The decoupling of content control and display from delivery systems enabled CityPass to view the same newsletter content in any location: as a preview within the administrative control center, as a page within the website, a subsection of a website page, or as an actual HTML email.
Using the existing PostgreSQL database allows the direct use of CityPass's existing affiliate contact information for their mailing list membership, with no need for messy and unproductive data exports or imports to exchange contact information between a primary database and a mailing system. End Point constructed the delivery control mechanisms to be completely database-driven, allowing scheduling of delivery for any time in the future, with database tracking of each mailing to provide both a history of each issue's delivery as well as a recovery mechanism, allowing interrupted delivery jobs to resume from where they left off.
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The Results
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CityPass received not just a newsletter mailing system but an easy-to-use content management system that integrates seamlessly with their existing website. The system is a powerful tool that meets their own relationship management needs for both affiliated companies and organizations as well as consumers.
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