Universities and colleges have a choice to make when it comes to choosing their CMS for their website transformation. But what do you actually need? This week, we look at top features and considerations for a seamless, personalized, and future-proof online experience.
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Top must-have CMS or DXP features for higher education institutions

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We know this already, Gen Z (and Gen Alpha, soon to follow) are looking for seamless experiences across channels, devices, and geographic boundaries.

And for the higher education marketer, at the heart of this is an efficient and powerful web CMS or DXP.

Of course, we say a web content management system (CMS), but really we mean digital engagement or experience platform (DXP), which goes beyond content management and allows instead for greater interactions across various channels.

Choosing the right one is a big endeavor, and going out to market with a request for proposal (RFP) can be daunting (luckily, we have you covered with our sample RFP, ready to use—check it out!)

Choosing the right CMS or digital engagement platform for your university or college takes more than ticking off features from a list.

It means taking a strategic approach to align your college or university’s goals with a DXP that will allow you to grow into the future and evolve your student, staff, and greater community experiences.

The right CMS or DXP is the backbone of your online presence, streamlining operations, enhancing collaboration, and providing a holistic online experience for prospective and current students, faculty, and staff.But in our experience, it’s really also down to implementation, so you need a reliable solution provider that understands the world of higher education and has significant experiene.

So let’s get to it. Here are our top features to look for when it’s time to find the right CMS or digital engagement platform for your higher education institution.

1. User-friendly interface

We tend to only use technology when it’s frictionless, so look for:

  • An intuitive interface that works for people with varying technical skills, without having to depend on your IT department.
  • A clean and straightforward interface ensures where you can easily create and edit/manage content without extensive coding or technical expertise
  • A platform that includes modules, content types, and flexible templates to build sections and pages easily, while maintaining branding and accessibility.
  • On-page edit features enable content creators to make on-the-fly edits without accessing a separate editing interface.

2. Governance and role-based access control

Managing college or university websites and keeping content fresh and engaging isn’t a simple task when remaining compliant with security, accessibility, content messaging, and brand consistency in a multi-user, multi-site environment.

Look for:

  • A robust permissions model that lets your users have access rights only over the content or processes they’re responsible for as part of their job and protects the other parts of your website. 
  • Pre-built as well as customizable roles, with granular control over who can edit which section of the website—and even which section of the page—including assets and reports.
  • Experience from your supplier/partner to walk you through the best ways to implement good governance of your platform and digital content.Single Sign-On user authentication and access on the basis of the principle of least privilege.

3. Multisite functionality

Your university or college may have multiple campuses and colleges, so make sure your CMS/DXP offers:

  • A multi-user, multi-site, and multi-location environment (centralized management of multiple websites from a single platform).
  • A “push-based” approach so that individual sites or subsites can be pushed to their own servers.
  • The ability to publish selected content that can be updated more regularly or content you’d like to publish to another domain or subdomain.

4. Integration capabilities

Seamless integration with existing systems is crucial.

Look for:

  • A platform that can integrate with student information systems, learning management systems, and other databases. This integration facilitates a smooth flow of information across various platforms.
  • An experienced supplier that can partner with you to advise you on the best solution about how and what to integrate.

5. Content versioning and workflow management

Teams need to work together in a collaborative (and scalable) environment, so make sure your CMS/DXP has:

  • Roll-back version control with tracked changes and visual version comparison  for each contributor for pages as well as assets.
  • Robust workflow management for every content type on a page that works with role-based user permissions.
  • Simple and effective ways of managing both these features.

6. Multilingual options

With growing competition, you may need to create and manage multilingual versions of your website. Look for a platform that supports:

  • Country-specific websites, or even microsites from a single platform in numerous languages.
  • Brand and navigation structure consistency, with previews.
  • Integration with automated translation services.
  • Version control with approval chains for each language, along with things like personalization, creating localized friendly forms, and publishing time zone-aware content.

7. Media management

Effective media management is crucial for a content-rich environment.

You’ll need:

  • A single source of truth for your assets, all in one place and in a familiar folder structure that lets you manage, sort, edit, search, and reuse your digital assets like images, videos, reusable text blocks, and documents.
  • Shareable and reuseable assets, with version control and role-based access.
  • Image edits in the media library that can be changed once and that update everywhere they’re used.
  • Integration with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so assets load super fast and on every device.
  • Manipulate images, including cropping and resizing, with multiple variations of a single asset so there’s no more duplication.

8. Personalization and audience targeting

To thrive in a competitive educational market, content needs to be served to new target audiences in a way that’s relevant.

Modern platforms can offer:

  • Personalization features, allowing you to tailor content and communications based on user preferences, behavior, and demographics.
  • Portals and intranets so content for prospective students, current students, staff, faculty, and alumni can easily be separated.

9. Search

This one’s important (well, they all are, but this one especially so): a powerful and integrated search engine is essential for user navigation.

  • A customizable search experience for your visitors.
  • Advanced search features, including indexing speed, frequency, filtering, auto-completion, with real-time keyword suggestions as the visitor types in the search field, and synonyms. Search facets, so visitors can quickly drill down into specific items, even when there are lots of search results.
  • Comprehensive search analytics reports that provide valuable insights to deep dive into the behavior of your visitors.

10. Metrics and analytics

With the right reports and analytics, you can get multiple insights that are crucial to running your site and making improvements.

Look for:

  • An intuitive and easy-to-use interface that makes non-technical users able to view analytics and content/user reports easily.
  • A dashboard with a heads-up view of the status of your content and users that lets you see, for example, content freshness, content ready for review.
  • Out-of-the-box integration with Google Analytics 4 and other platforms and a dashboard that presents analytics in real time.

11. Security

Security is non-negotiable. Ensure your platform prioritizes:

  • Robust data security, user authentication, and protection against cyber threats. 
    ISO 27001 certification.
  • Security, DDoS monitoring, firewalls, and patch management solutions.
  • Mitigation against OWASP risks.

12. Hosting

If you’re not hosting your websites onsite, you’ll need:

  • An ISO 27001-certified, fully managed hosted solution with 24/7 monitoring.
  • A resilient web infrastructure solution, so updates, performance, and managing security is all taken care of.
  • High availability to ensure that your website runs well even during peak periods.

13. Scalability

Your platform should be able to:

  • Scale as your institution (and your content!) grows.
  • Can handle increased amounts of content and traffic without compromising performance.
  • Provide frequent updates and feature releases, with an extensible range of APIs for future integrations.

14. Community and support

A strong community and reliable support from your partner are invaluable.

Do they have:

  • A company culture of collaboration and service?
  • Client forums and an active user community and responsive customer support?
  • Their finger on the pulse of the higher education community and their needs?

15. An experienced partner

Lastly, a platform is only as good as its implementation.

So find a friendly, professional partner (not just a supplier) that has:

  • Extensive experience successfully delivering similar projects in the higher education sector.
  • Training for users at all technical levels.
  • Extensive migration experience, to move your content to your new DXP.
  • A partnership with long-term support and account management.

Still unsure of what to look for? Reach out to our team before you start your next digital transformation project, we’re happy to help.

And in the meantime, check out our non-branded Sample RFP, which you can use as a starting point to begin the tendering process.