Scaling Digital Experiences in EdTech: How Encoura Standardized Content Management with CrafterCMS

Enterprises with multiple unique websites and applications can find it challenging to manage these sites when it comes time to scale. This problem becomes even larger when integrations and other tech stack components are added.

At Encoura, a leading EdTech company connecting students to higher education institutions, these imperatives take shape across a diverse ecosystem of apps, platforms, and user personas. To support this complexity, Encoura turned to CrafterCMS, leveraging its headless architecture and extensibility to unify content operations while preserving the agility of individual devopment teams.

In this blog post based on a talk at CrafterCMS Live! 2025 by Encoura and Kingsway Digital (a certified CrafterCMS Solution Partner), we break down how Encoura rolled out CrafterCMS across its organization, the architectural decisions that shaped its deployment, and the tools they built to streamline development and authoring at scale.

Encoura’s Websites and Digital Applications

Encoura is an educational services company that provides custom technology solutions combining Eduventures research, data science, strategic enrollment services, and multichannel marketing to serve over 2,000 higher education institutions.

Two of their key products include Encourage, a college and career planning app, and Encoura, an enrollment and admissions services platform. Encourage is available on mobile and the web and helps students with career exploration, finding colleges and scholarships, and more. Meanwhile, the Encoura product connects colleges and universities to students and their families using machine learning and data science. 

Each product serves a different user base with different patterns and UI experiences. Each has its own development team and then the CMS team, which sits at the center, providing digital experiences for each product and other products managed by Encoura.

Developer teams from both the Encourage app and the Encoura app need to be able to manage their own frontends. For Encourage, fine-tuning the digital experience to keep students engaged is critical. For the Encoura app, the product provides access to customer data, and data privacy is a key requirement. 

Introducing CrafterCMS

Encoura deployed CrafterCMS Enterprise to implement an agile approach, eliminate friction with existing teams, and improve developer productivity by giving them full control over the frontend. The adoption of CrafterCMS began with small headless features, specific tools and custom components, and highly customized experiences. After the CMS was fully implemented, the Encoura team realized they wanted to further accelerate efficiencies by standardizing the experience across all dev teams and making things easier for themselves and the dev teams they supported. 

Encoura’s CMS Implementation Architecture

Encoura’s existing architecture includes a mix of headless sites, hybrid sites, server-side rendered sites, and public sites and sites protected behind authentication in the cloud. The sites include: 

• Encoura Cloud: The main platform site is a client-side website built using a headless Next.js web application. 
• Help Center: A support site built using Next.js with a mix of React Server Components (RSC) and client components. 
• Encourage Students: The main student site, but using a headless Next.js web app & mobile app with content served through the mobile app and Apollo GraphQL federation
• Taxonomy: A library site for shared taxonomy.
• Portal: The Encoura intranet, a cClient-side headless React app that is personalized and secure.
• Digital: A static web server.

Additionally, Encoura was using CrafterCMS’s standard REST services, custom Groovy-based services, and OpenSearch, with two authentication models and content secured using CrafterCMS’s authorized roles feature. 

Accelerating Development

The initial challenge was that every site had its own distinct requirements. The CMS team needed to reduce the workload and cognitive load on developers and QA, and reduce the time-to-market for new features. 

To standardize common elements and free up resources to address the unique aspects of each site, Encoura reused the most common elements. These included: 

• Content Types: Articles, Images, Video, Lists
• Design Patterns: Page details, taxonomy integration, page routing, Experience Builder
• Plugins: Any plugin whose features are needed in more than one place

Key Standardizations

Encoura Common Plugin

After several sites had matured and expanded, the Encoura CMS team found themselves using plugins in multiple locations. This meant building and deploying multiple plugins and running full regression cycles on each site and plugin. To solve this problem, they merged all custom widgets, data sources, and form controls into a single plugin. This common plugin, based on CrafterCMS's plugin framework, standardized components deployed on more than one site and saved the developer and quality assurance teams a huge amount of time. 

Encoura CMS React Toolkit

The Encoura CMS React Toolkit serves developers on the other Encoura app teams. It helps accelerate the adoption of CrafterCMS, standardize coding practices among CMS teams, reduce bugs, and encourage proper use of Experience Builder. 

Dynamic CMS Documentation

Additionally, Encoura created a dynamic CMS modeling site that provides technical documentation about the Encoura content model. It documents content types, attributes, and data sources, making it easy for non-technical people to read but functional enough to provide quick access to complete technical specifications and reduce the cognitive load on developers. 

Measurable Outcomes

Encoura’s thoughtful approach to CMS standardization and tooling has yielded:

• Faster time to market for content-driven features.
• Reduced training and QA overhead.
• Reusable components that accelerate new project launches.
• Empowered dev teams who can own their UI without sacrificing CMS value.

Looking Ahead

Encoura plans to extend its CMS practices to new products (e.g., its educator platform) and continue evolving the React Toolkit. They're also exploring ways AI can enhance developer operations, content modeling, and authoring, anticipating an exciting future where CMS and generative AI go hand in hand.

Final Thoughts

Encoura’s CMS strategy is a masterclass in meeting complex enterprise needs with agile tooling, developer enablement, and thoughtful governance. For IT leaders navigating multi-product environments, this story underscores the importance of flexibility, shared standards, and empowering teams with the right tools.

Watch this recording of the CrafterCMS Live! 2025 talk, Accelerating Content-Oriented Digital Experience Development Across the Enterprise to learn more about how Encoura streamlined CMS development across many dev teams, and learn about the best practices they followed to realize productivity improvements. You will also see the results they achieved using CrafterCMS.