Using Token Replacement to Streamline Term Updates

Imagine this situation: you manage a fleet of constantly changing content — like, for example, loan rates across a banking system. Every time these rates change, you must ensure they’ve changed across the entire site.

We’re talking about more than an “oops, we have an old version number” situation — we’re talking about a financial regulatory situation. One that carries serious consequences.

There are several ways to tackle volatile content terms within a content management system. For Gate City Bank’s Optimizely instance, Blend developed a unique tool that allows for “token replacement,” creating a single source of data updates that spread across the site.

First, an editor establishes a “token replacement” block — essentially defining the parameters behind a token, including a rich-text and non-rich-text value — and an internal editorial comment. As editors create content within the page, they can pull up a list of all tokens to drop into the content. For example, if an editor wants to insert a savings account rate, or a snippet of a disclosure, they can drop that directly into the page with confidence that the term will update whenever the source term is changed.

Then, when a user lands on a page, the site checks for tokens and updated disclosures and makes the replacements.

Editors can now manage all rates and other site-wide changing terms within one system, providing consistency and governance around regulatory content. In doing so, we changed that “financial regulatory” situation into an “easy to update content” situation — the best kind of situation, we’d all agree.

Project Results

• Regulatory and high-velocity content and terms became easier to manage.
• A single source of truth for all token terms within the CMS.
• A simple text string that allows for creation of tokens within the body of text.