How Junior Achievement created a centralized system for managing region-specific sites and content
Intro
Founded in 1919, Junior Achievement is now one of the world’s largest youth-serving NGOs that provide experiential learning and education related to work readiness, financial literacy, and future career planning to students aged 5 to 25.
Challenge
From Fragmented Microsites to a Unified Brand
As Junior Achievement moved into the digital era, the organization needed an easier way to manage hundreds of localized area websites. Under the old system, built in Liferay, each office nation-wide was largely independent in building its own local website. This led to inconsistent overall branding for Junior Achievement and enormous effort in training local staff to manage their own sites.
Junior Achievement needed a centralized system for managing sites with region-specific content while enabling marketing teams to reduce inconsistencies of the organization’s overall brand and to avoid duplicated efforts. They believed this would be the key to optimizing the brand’s online presence for SEO and improving its SERP in the long run.
In particular, Junior Achievement was looking for a platform that provided:
Workflows for consistent branding across microsites
Reuse of content for streamlined site launches and reduced workloads
Data privacy and SEO compliance tools out of the box
Ability to easily deliver mobile responsiveness by default
We needed the ability to fire up another site or document repository [at any moment], and because we keep adding to our digital presence, we needed the ability to add sites very quickly, but at the same time, to keep everything clean and organized.
Robert Berndt
Senior Web Developer, Junior Achievement
Solution
Reclaiming Control: Multi-Tenant Content Made Simple for Junior Achievement
Feeling that the grip on their content and operations was weakening, Junior Achievement turned to dotCMS for a powerful, multi-tenant CMS that could help them keep everything consistent and under control.
Since dotCMS has the ability to host multiple sites within a single interface, its object-based content repository made it easy to reuse content across sites. Also, the key advantage of object-based content for Junior Achievement is that the content types they’ve implemented closely match terminology that the organization and end-users have understood for decades such as events, programs, and campaigns.
This alignment with the organization’s business structure wouldn’t have been possible with other page-based CMS solutions.
Results
20x Faster Site Launches: Junior Achievement’s Multi-Site Transformation
With their previous CMS, Liferay, individual offices had too much flexibility in what they could edit. This increased the time it took content editors to make decisions as administrators had to worry about tasks which didn’t help grow the company.
Thanks to dotCMS, Junior Achievement saves both money and time. The organization can now launch a new site within hours instead of weeks, and its employees require much less training because of the platform’s intuitive interface.
Before I would shell out a website and it would take probably two weeks worth of training
Robert Berndt, Webmaster & Senior Web Developer at Junior Achievement.
Now his team can get area administrators up and running in a matter of minutes on the phone. The rich authoring environment makes it straightforward for content creators to meet SEO and 508 compliance requirements without months of training.
We’ve really made a huge leap in the amount of time that we are saving in getting content out on our website.
Junior Achievement is now able to get a site spun up 20x faster than their old system, now just a matter of hours instead of weeks.
Thanks to dotCMS’ ability to easily create and manage sophisticated, multi-step workflows - in parallel with no-code tooling and capabilities, administrators can work easier and developers can avoid minor changes that take lots of time.
With the streamlined workflow in-place, Junior Achievement runs 200-250 microsites and growing as the initial success of the first area sites sparked demand from other offices to be moved over to dotCMS quickly as well.
The organization never could have achieved the same scale using Liferay, which lacked the efficiency for multi-tenant management that dotCMS provides. With digital experiences across hundreds of websites a reality, Junior Achievement is now poised to face future technology trends.