Why content management still matters, more than ever
At manifesto, we believe content management systems (CMSs) remain critical in an AI-enabled world. As digital experiences diversify and service delivery becomes increasingly automated, what your organisation says, and how it’s surfaced, is often your most visible output.
Your content is no longer just a digital asset; it’s your voice, your authority, your relevance. And its effective management is what underpins your organisation’s credibility and adaptability.
For many nonprofits and membership bodies, content may soon be one of the only things they still “deliver” directly, whether it's guidance, policy, support, or impact storytelling. But how that content reaches your users is rapidly evolving.
AI agents, voice assistants, search engines, LLM-powered interfaces and mobile apps are overtaking the traditional website as primary gateways. Your CMS must be equipped to reach users across these channels, with structured, trustworthy, and accessible content.
Adapting to new realities: strategic shifts in CMS thinking
In this new landscape, CMSs are no longer just website platforms, they’re strategic infrastructure. To remain impactful and resilient, your CMS strategy needs to shift from “publishing pages” to “enabling multi-channel, machine-readable content delivery.”
This means:
- Owning and structuring your data in a way that’s flexible, interoperable, and future-proof
- Delivering content where your users already are - not expecting them to come to you
- Preparing for AI integration, where large language models and smart agents depend on clean, well-structured, and accessible content to surface your message
- Creating resilience through modularity, where components can evolve independently and your CMS can adapt to changing tools, interfaces, and user behaviours
Composable DXPs and headless CMSs: built for change
For years, the digital experience community has talked about “composable architecture”, breaking away from monolithic platforms to adopt more flexible, API-driven systems. That conversation is now business critical.
A composable digital experience platform (DXP) allows organisations to combine CMS, CRM, analytics, search, and AI tools into a modular ecosystem. This is essential for teams needing to move quickly, experiment, or integrate with external platforms.
At the core of many composable DXPs is a headless CMS - a content management system that separates the backend content authoring from the frontend delivery layer.
For those that may have missed these terms, some quick explainers.
A headless CMS:
- stores your content centrally
- exposes it via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)
- allows delivery across multiple channels - websites, apps, emails, chatbots, AI interfaces, and more.
By contrast, a monolithic CMS tightly couples backend content with a single, predefined frontend — typically a website. This limits flexibility and makes content harder to reuse.
The “Create Once, Publish Everywhere” (COPE) model enabled by headless CMSs is what allows your content to scale across digital touchpoints, essential for charities, membership organisations, and campaigning bodies with lean teams and growing content demands.
Making your CMS strategy more impactful and resilient
To make your CMS strategy future-ready, in an AI-driven, multi-channel world, assess it against these strategic principles:
- Modularity
– Enables you to swap or upgrade individual components (e.g. search, personalisation, analytics) without disrupting the entire stack
– Reduces dependency on single vendors and allows agile evolution - Interoperability
– Ensures your CMS can integrate easily with CRM, analytics, AI models, identity platforms, and marketing automation tools
– Supports flexible data flow and ecosystem-wide visibility - Reusability
– Allows content to be authored once and deployed across multiple platforms (web, apps, email, chat, voice, AI interfaces)
– Enhances consistency, reduces duplication, and supports scale - Performance and scalability
– Optimises page speed, delivery pipelines, and multi-device responsiveness
– Supports peak traffic, campaign bursts, and channel expansion - Governance and workflow efficiency
– Provides editorial controls, workflow management, versioning, and content reuse logic
– Enables lean teams to manage complex content estates with clarity and control
CMS tools we use and recommend
manifesto works with a range of CMS platforms, always choosing tools that align with your organisational goals, technical maturity, and editorial needs:
- Drupal and Umbraco – open-source, extensible, with strong API first support (REST and GraphQL)
- WordPress – has community support for extendable headless deployment
- Contentful, Sanity, Prismic, Strapi – SaaS-first, API-native platforms designed for composable delivery
Each tool has trade-offs in flexibility, licensing, community support, and development models, but all can support a modern, headless, AI-integrated strategy when implemented correctly.
We typically recommend open-source platforms for clients seeking long-term control, cost efficiency, and community-driven evolution.
Where this is going: the AI-integrated digital experience
AI is reshaping how users discover, consume, and trust information. Whether via generative search, summarised guidance, or conversational interfaces, your content must be structured and accessible enough to surface outside your own site.
This is where your CMS strategy becomes business critical:
- Can your content be accessed by machines, not just people?
- Is it structured, tagged, and trustworthy enough for AI agents to prioritise it?
- Can you adapt to new channels without rebuilding your stack?
If the answer is no, or not yet, it’s time to revisit your architecture.
The bottom line
If you’ve invested in a modern CMS in the past 5 years you are likely in a good position for our interconnected and data driven future . But if your system is still web-first, monolithic, or inflexible, it may limit your ability to serve your users where they are.
Your CMS is no longer a backend system. It’s your organisation’s content engine, trust layer, and integration hub.
We help organisations get the best out of their CMS whether that be optimising what you have or modernising and future-proofing your CMS platforms to ensure they are resilient, composable, and ready for AI.
We’ll follow up on this article with more in-depth insights on decoupled architectures and integrations with AI systems - so stay tuned.