The Henry Ford heightens its digital channels visibility

The Henry Ford is maximizing digital experiences for its 3 million online guests with a new content management system.

The organization, which includes a collection of more than 26 million artifacts spanning 300 years of American history, is using Progress Sitefinity CMS to help drive visits to the museum and provide an opportunity for visitors to view all its assets from anywhere in the world. Its goal involved consolidating more than 1.5 terabytes of data from more than 40 disparate web properties into a single, easy-to-navigate, mobile friendly digital experience.

Matt Majeski, director of digital and emerging media at The Henry Ford, says, “With 50 percent of our online traffic coming from mobile devices, the user experience had to be seamless. It also had to be easy to use and optimized for search. Based on those requirements, our partner, Perficient Digital, recommended Progress Sitefinity. With its content management system, we can pull together disparate data and implement analytics across the unified website, enabling informed business decisions about how to optimize the user experience.”

Using the CMS, The Henry Ford’s digital and emerging media team created relationships between data and stories about the artifacts. Consolidating search across all data sources enabled people around the world to find information about the organization and its artifacts more easily. For example, when the Rosa Parks story was launched online, within six months, 43,000 people visited the website and spent a total of 265,000 minutes on that story alone.

The Henry Ford also used the Progress Sitefinity content management system to simplify site maintenance, resulting in a 50 percent improvement in efficiency, according to the company. The Henry Ford also plans to continue to blend the physical museum and digital properties with additional kiosk features, geolocation and wayfinding.