The Benefits of COPE and its Implementation

As the name indicates, the objective of “Create Once, Publish Everywhere” (aka “COPE”) is to minimize multiple content versions by implementing an infrastructure that allows you to publish a single piece of content to as many different platforms in as many different output types as you need.

NPR’s then Director of Application Development, David Jacobson, introduced the concept in 2009 and since then use of COPE has exploded, fueled by the ever-increasing number of devices and platforms needing to consume and output content.

The Benefits of COPE

1. Scalability

No longer limited to just sharing content across multiple sites, today’s content management systems are also used to publish content to print, digital signage, third party systems and databases, mobile apps, and wearable technology. The challenge is in keeping up. As content guru Karen McGrane put it, “We’re outmatched. There aren’t enough designers and developers to battle every platform. There aren’t enough editors and writers to populate every screen size.” It’s true. Unless we implement a COPE approach to our content management, we don’t stand a chance, because we can’t keep up with every device available today, let alone in the future.

With new platforms emerging every day, it’s crucial that your content management be scalable in order to stay sane and to avoid significant overhead increase. According to Content Crossroads, “the biggest advantage of COPE is that it provides scope for considerable growth with less resources. Not to mention the amount of money and time that can be saved by not having to create different content for different platforms!”

2. Wider Audience Reach

Every platform that you decide not to publish to is a limitation. The ability to publish content to many different pages, sites, systems, and devices (while optimizing the display for each one), allows you to reach a much wider audience. With a COPE approach, you can post an article to your newsroom and add pertinent metadata, such as category or keyword. Pieces of your article can then automatically be pushed to your homepage, RSS feeds, social media, mobile apps, emails, or digital signage.

COPE also makes your content more accessible. Keep in mind that accessibility comes in many different forms. It’s not just about making sure that vision-impaired users can access your content. People who are hearing impaired, reading impaired, neurologically impaired, who have limited, slow or no Internet access, or who are technologically challenged also have accessibility concerns that should be addressed. COPE empowers you to find ways to ensure that your content is available to and consumable by everyone.

3. Greater Accuracy and Content Freshness

There’s also the question of helping your audience find your content to begin with. With search engines increasingly penalizing stale pages, implementing a COPE approach can significantly boost your content’s freshness factor, as contributors don’t have to manage content in multiple places.

Having to manually maintain content in different locations makes it easy for updates to slip through the cracks. COPE, on the other hand, allows you to minimize the risk of outdated or inaccurate content.

What Do You Need to Implement COPE?

1. Buy-in From Key Stakeholders

The first thing you need is buy-in from key stakeholders to implement COPE. This is best accomplished by educating them on the benefits – time saved, more accurate information, and the ability to reach the widest possible audience – and reminding them that it’s inevitable.  As publishing platforms continue to grow, COPE will soon be the only sustainable approach to content management.

2. Separation of Content From Design

An essential requirement of COPE is the complete separation of content from presentation. This is where choosing the right content management system comes into play. As Jacobson pointed out, “True CMS’s are really just content capturing tools that are completely agnostic as to how or where the content will be viewed, whether it is a web page, mobile app, TV or radio display.” As a result, it is crucial that you don’t let your content contributors get bogged down in styling their content.

Formatting for emphasis and meaning should be replaced by good semantics. And the only way for your contributors to learn how to do this is by eliminating the distraction of styling and design. Let them instead focus on their actual content.  That’s how they (and you) will be sure that it’s fresh, relevant, and can be understood by people consuming it on any platform, including audio readers.

3. Structured Content Entry

The single most important component to implementing COPE successfully is to structure your content entry fields. True COPE deployment requires that you replace antiquated approaches to content management with a more structured approach. Having one monolithic WYSIWYG editor makes it impossible to take specific pieces of content and publish them to different platforms.  Instead, you’ll have smaller, more structured and reusable content entry fields. Karen McGrane often compares the two set-ups as “dumb blobs versus smart chunks.”

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, in her article “Future Ready Content,” sums up the need for the modularization of content by embracing “meaningful, modular chunks that are ready to travel” and what it means for your CMS. As she puts it, “with a CMS that’s organized around modular, meaningful chunks of content, you’ll be ready to create rules for how that content should bend and shift—and have the systems in place to actually implement them.”

Not conducive for COPE: all content is stored in a “dumb blob”, so it’s difficult to pull out specific parts and publish them to different platforms.

Conducive for COPE: small chunks that can easily be reused.

While the output looks exactly the same for both of the approaches, only the example on the right enables you to successfully implement COPE in a strategic manner. It may be a bit of a paradigm shift for those end users who just want to enter everything in one big WYSIWYG editor, but if you’re serious about COPE and the future of content management, the use of smaller and more structured content entry fields must be mandated.

COPE-Conducive CMS

A successful COPE implementation also necessitates a CMS that facilitates cross-site sharing of assets, both manually and automatically. When assessing your current CMS (or any potential replacements), carefully analyze whether you can output an individual piece of content in as many different formats as you need to without having to duplicate any content – and also how it’s done. Some CMSes set restrictions on how much you can administer in a single instance, so determine whether the CMS lets you manage as many different sites as you need and if it will publish your content to an unlimited number of destinations without breaking the bank.

Make sure your chosen CMS separates content from design so that your content contributors can focus on their content instead of being distracted by stylization elements. Finally, be sure that your CMS allows you to structure your content into small, reusable chunks rather than big blobs.

Think of your CMS not just as a solution to publish web content, but any type of content.  Implementing COPE is the only truly scalable approach to content management, as the number of platforms that need to consume and output content will continue to multiply. If you haven’t started thinking about COPE, now is the time to do so.

What about you? Have you implemented COPE at your organization?