Using Editorial Workflows for Your Higher-Ed Catalog

Managing edits to your college's catalog can be one of the biggest hangups in the process — for many colleges and universities, it can often turn into a months-long mess of wrangling hard-copy edits, email changes, Word docs that may or may not have tracked changes, and much more.

Clean Catalog solves this problem by providing a simple but powerful editorial system that allows you to manage catalog edits in a fully digital way, making the catalog editing process much simpler and even easy to manage. Here's a rundown of how we do it.

User Accounts and Roles Allow You to Manage Who Does What

Clean Catalog comes with unlimited user accounts, and you have full control over what each user account can and cannot do. For example, you may have a user account that only edits accounting pages, and you may have another user account that only edits your student handbook.

Editorial Workflows Ensure Your Content Gets Proper Approval

For many colleges and universities, content needs to go through a specific approval process before it's published. With Clean Catalog, these processes can be built in: an accounting page can be edited, and then submitted to approval to the department dean, who can then publish it or send it back for further edits.

Revision Management Makes Changes Clear and Easy to Manage

In Clean Catalog, every change to any piece of content is tracked and saved, and you can easily see what was changed, who changed it, and when — and revert to a previous version if needed. So if there are questions about why an edit was made, it's easy to figure out who did it and talk to them about it.

Editorial Processes Can Be as Simple or as Complicated as You Want

All of our editorial processes are fully customizable — you can create unlimited user accounts, permissions, roles, editorial states, etc., and you can be as granular or as broad as needed. For some colleges, a single master editor is all they need. For others, we have more than 60 accounts with more than 30 editorial sections, with workflows requiring two or three steps of content approval.

Build Your Editorial Management System as You Need It

We know that big ships turn slowly, and it's sometimes difficult to implement a whole new system all at once. We work with colleges to implement Clean Catalog in a way that works for them. For many colleges, that means that the first year we stick with the old editing system — they make edits in Word or on hard copies, and then we import those into Clean Catalog. We then train your staff on how to edit that existing content, giving them a year of making minor edits before fully implementing the editorial system when they build the next year's catalog.

Obviously, the sooner you can implement your editorial system the better, but often easing the college staff into the new process can make it a smooth and sustainable way to manage your catalog for years to come.