Featured Movable Type Site: National Geographic

Engaging a Loyal Audience in Brand New Ways

In the fall of 2008, publishing giant National Geographic decided to re-vamp their online presence and create a network of blogs and forums to engage with audiences from both print publications and television shows. They chose Movable Type to power their new initiative for several reasons: they wanted to purchase a license that would allow them to own all of their content; they wanted to host their site locally for complete control; and they needed enterprise-level support.

“Movable Type offered a better level of support than we found with other companies,” says Anton Gelman, senior producer at National Geographic. “It gave us complete control over our content, and we felt that it was also a very cost-effective choice.”

The company consolidated all of its older blogs and launched a number of new ones, including the Dog Whisperer, the Explorer Blog and the DogEared Books Blog for Kids. “Launching communities is a complex process,” Gelman says. “You start out thinking that people want one thing, but you have to be flexible and open to tweaking things over time.”

The company has found that Movable Type allows them to do just that: “The fact that so many Movable Type functions are widgetized and can be modified by dragging and dropping enables our producers to make most changes themselves,” says Gelman.

MT Provides a Fast, Affordable Way to Update Content

Previously, he reports, National Geographic’s legacy systems required a great deal of technical know-how to manipulate; producers had to file requests with the IT department for every change they wanted to implement: “Now that producers can change things on their own, they can quickly respond to our what our audiences are doing.” For instance, if readers are clicking a lot on a certain widget, they can re-position it to a prominent spot on the site.

“It is significantly cheaper to do it this way,” Gelman says. “The Movable Type platform has saved us tremendously both on cost and speed to market.”

National Geographic often launches their blogs internally before revealing them to the public to get feedback, identify potential issues, and also to expose the whole company to the features and functions available on the MT platform. “Now that we have Movable Type, all of our internal ‘customers’ have access to the same innovations and tool sets,” Gelman explains. “Different departments don’t have to start from scratch when they want to build or change a blog.” The approach not only saves the company time and money, but it also benefits readers and visitors: “People now have a cohesive experience when they visit National Geographic blogs,” Gelman explains. “Each site will feel like a part of something bigger.”

The company has ambitious goals for growing its online presence in the years to come, and blogging will play a central role; it plans to create blogs for every television show and blogs that extend content from popular sections within its publications. A single sign-on will give members full access to all of the content created by National Geographic, thus building community and fostering connections. “We’re committed to making blogging an integral part of our publishing strategy in the future,” Gelman says.