Unifying a Digital Ecosystem to Accelerate Engagement and Content Operations
WorldStrides
The Challenge
WorldStrides is a national leader in experiential educational travel, serving educators, parents, and students across K–12 and higher education. For more than five decades, the organization has helped bring learning beyond the classroom to immersive, life-changing experiences.
Over time, that mission expanded into a diverse portfolio of brands across domestic and global programs. While the business grew intentionally and successfully, its digital ecosystem reflected the natural complexity of that growth.
As new programs and brands were introduced, more than 30 managed sites emerged, making it increasingly difficult to scale, govern, and evolve as a unified brand. Maintaining consistency and responding quickly to new business needs required significant coordination. Often, teams described the same destinations and programs in different ways within this highly distributed content environment.
For an organization where the experience begins long before the trip—often with a website visit from a parent, teacher, or student—every digital touchpoint plays a critical role in shaping every journey from the start. As WorldStrides looked ahead, it became clear that a flexible digital foundation was needed to support consistent experiences, operational efficiency, and long-term scalability.
The Solution
WorldStrides partnered with Verndale on its digital transformation. As a strategic partner, Verndale helped prioritize what would deliver immediate value at launch while preserving long-term goals and focusing on essential components.
At the core of this phased approach was a composable architecture built on SitecoreAI (XM Cloud), consolidating more than 30 sites into a unified ecosystem that supports multiple business units. To further scale content operations, Verndale integrated Google Gemini with Content Hub to automate image tagging across tens of thousands of assets for faster search and more efficient campaign execution. Additionally, reusable components and templates enabled edit-once, publish-everywhere workflows, reducing duplication and manual effort across teams, and improving governance.
Equally important, the platform helped shift away from IT-dependent updates and sprint-based queues toward independent content management updates accomplished in weeks rather than months.
To modernize without disrupting operations and supporting the full scope of the business, Verndale integrated legacy systems via APIs, preserving critical workflows while evolving the front-end experience. A phased rollout, launching the K-12 audience first, followed by Higher Education, allowed the organization to validate the approach, refine the model, and scale with confidence.
The Outcome
WorldStrides now operates more quickly and with greater control. Consolidating more than 30 sites into a single ecosystem, centralized content management, strengthened brand consistency across channels, and enabled marketing teams to respond to business needs in weeks rather than months.
Just as important, the platform has maintained zero downtime since launch, including during peak enrollment periods, ensuring stability when it matters most.
Within Higher Education, the new site delivered strong year-over-year gains during the October–December enrollment window. Average session duration increased by 60%, engagement rose by 5.7%, and key events grew by 394%, driven by clearer navigation and more visible support pathways, such as chat and outreach forms.
Across the broader platform, engagement has deepened significantly. Views per active user increased 65% YoY, average engagement time rose 56% YoY, and key conversions, including contact form submissions, portal registrations, and logins, are up 117% YoY. Together, these results reflect stronger user intent, improved measurement, and a platform built to scale across new brands and initiatives.
Increase in Average Session Duration
Increase in Engagement
Growth in Key Events
How We Got It Done
Capabilities
Technologies
Success Stories
Aspen Snowmass
Sitecore
Panera Bread
Sitecore
Get in Touch
Allen Schweitzer
Chef de la direction des revenus