CKEditor is helping Addiction Recovery to grow as a company and achieve its business goals faster
CKEditor 5 helps Addiction Recovery achieve its business goals faster
Addiction Recovery (AR) is a content company for recovery centers, created and run by a few Internet geeks who are passionate about recovery as much as they are about designing and coding. The organization does blog content writing, web page writing, and a little bit of email marketing. Unlike many other content writing businesses, AR focuses entirely on the addiction recovery space. It aims to become the first and only true resource for people looking to find information about recovery facilities and recovery in general.
AR clients are all individual recovery facility centers where people that are struggling with addiction can go and stay to get treatments. These facilities are located all over the United States and each one of them has specific requirements and separate messages they're trying to convey. And what Addiction Recovery writers provide is content tailored to the particular recovery centers’ needs. The bottom line of delivering content for their websites is generating more traffic and letting more people learn about addiction recovery itself.
The majority of the people that work for AR, have been through the recovery process and are now sober by choice. This individual experience and insight let them cover stories better because they've gone through it themselves. This way, the company creates a space where individuals and families who are struggling with addiction can find good, accurate, and comprehensive information as well as treatment facilities that provide fair and honest services.
Challenge: handling the content creation needs of a fast-growing company
Addiction Recovery was established about nine years ago but the company has focused on writing blog content for recovery facilities in the last couple of years. It started out with just a few facilities, with one or two writers, and it's grown from there immensely. Now about 60 writers, some editors, and other people involved are doing content writing for 45-50 active clients, delivering between 500 and 600 articles on web pages per month.
But before AR got to where it is now it had to face many challenges, with spotting a versatile and powerful tool to fulfill all its content creation needs topping the list. And finding a perfect match - CKEditor 5 - took some time, indeed.
In the beginning, writers were just creating their articles in Word or Google Docs - not using anything fancy. And then, AR tried a different service - a third-party company’s platform - to facilitate all of their writing but it just didn’t work for them.
Addiction Recovery simply grew too fast and this external company that they worked with couldn't handle the volume of work that it was receiving every month. This way, the service became incredibly slow and unusable. In fact, it took almost five minutes to load a page on this platform at some point.
AR concluded that to move forward properly, it was going to need to do something custom and in-house. And they started developing the platform that they're currently using in September 2021; it was ready after about three months of development. And one of the first things that they realized was that they needed a really good text editor for over 60 content creators to use regularly.
Solution: switching to a powerful, complete editing software
That's when Addiction Recovery discovered CKEditor 5 - due to not getting what they were looking for out of the platform that they had been using before. Rolling out the initial version of their web application only took them three months. It all came together very quickly and successfully, and CKEditor was a huge part of the process, providing everything that they needed, Tyler Cunningham, Lead Product Manager at Addiction Recovery, admits.
Tyler has been using CKEditor as a web developer for years, acknowledging it as one of the industry standards. He used it in several CMS applications he’s developed over the years and just always knew about its existence. And when AR started looking for their new editor, they knew they wanted something that offered collaboration features as well as autosave and commenting because they were used to these features when using Google Docs. The company wanted to replicate them for its teams so that multiple individuals could work on a document at the same time.
CKEditor was one of the first things that came up when Tyler sat down and started just looking up collaborative text editors. He was interested in CKEditor 5 and all the new collaboration features. After doing the live demos on the website, it became clear to him that this was going to solve 99%, if not 100%, of what AR was to deal with. And then Tyler and his colleagues just got the process started and did test implementation - settling on CKEditor was very easy overall. There was only one other editor that they tried but it didn't work for them. CKEditor 5 was just the clear winner so the decision to move forward with it was easy.
How does CKEditor enhance the writing process that comprises both writers’ and editors’ tasks? First of all, AR team members use CKEditor to facilitate communication that would normally have to happen on Slack or via a Zoom call. This makes everything much quicker because they're able to just do their work in one place instead of using several different lines of communication. The writer and the editor may be in the document at the same time, working collaboratively to resolve whatever the issue might be.
CKEditor gives us a competitive advantage because we're just able to do more with less time.
Result: writing more pieces of content at a time
Using CKEditor 5 translates to many advantages that writers enjoy in their daily jobs. The first one is just this WYSIWYG editor’s flawlessness - AR has never experienced an outage or the collaborative features going down. CKEditor has a very limited scheduled downtime, which works really well for the AR team because its members often work remotely, across different countries and many time zones. And the fact that the editor is just always up and running is one of the biggest benefits for them.
“We’ve never had any development issues utilizing CKEditor. It's just very well-built, it's reliable and it gives our writers a platform where they feel comfortable doing their work,” Tyler Cunningham adds.
Working so well, being so reliable, and allowing them to do their job faster, CKEditor 5 has given AR a significant competitive edge - the ability for their writing team to complete their articles quicker. This resulted in acquiring some additional clients in a short time. The company has taken on another 12 or 13 clients between January and April 2022 alone.
We were able to do that because our team members can work more efficiently and get their jobs done quicker. CKEditor simply allows them to do more work in the same amount of time: they can do 10 articles in the time that they would otherwise do eight. CKEditor is very, very important to our business goals.
The editor provides the tools that writers and editors need to do their jobs faster. And it allows everyone on the team to work together whenever they need to get any writing or editing done. Collaborative writing or commenting is in use quite a lot, making the content creation process much smoother. “The fact that the tool works so well and that our team enjoys using it so much just makes their day-to-day work easier,” Tyler Cunningham admits.
As for the support CKEditor provides, they've only had to use it once and Tyler thinks this reflects just how great CKEditor works and how well it is documented. The documentation is just so clearly outlined that the AR developer never had a question regarding it - it's just very easy for him to implement new things with it. For the one time they used it, the support offered was outstanding, and they received a very quick response.
AR just wants to continue to scale the company organically, expand its operations, and launch the public beta of its new version of AddictionRecovery.com with more features, switching to a solution with a complete React front end later this year. Currently, they don’t have any other content creation needs to be fulfilled. “If we ever have, then we would 100% just continue to utilize CKEditor because it just works so well for us,” Tyler Cunningham concludes.