Scenario
Users may wish to be notified when content is updated on the site. In the past this may have meant signing up to a newsletter or subscribing to an RSS feed. Sadly the demise of RSS as a format means it is not a viable solution for sites with many channels to publish.
Challenge
The publishing and consumption of channel updates remains a problem. From a technical perspective it is easy to create feeds of JSON, XML or RSS. The difficult part is for users to subscribe to the channels. GovCMS doesn’t have any such inbuilt solution and so an external one needs to be found.
Solution
External eDM solutions offer the most sensible approach as they are able to handle the bulk sending of email. The various platforms have different capabilities for the list management which can be configured for each of the channels. Some solutions allow for the user to select from various dimensions and cadences for the notifications. Such solutions are custom by nature.
Outcome
This is a tricky area. The easiest solution is to limit the number of channels and to set up a discrete set of lists which can be subscribed to. Moving beyond this setup will generally require a more custom subscription to manage.
