WorldStrides streamlines content management with ‘single source of truth’ solution

WorldStrides is a global leader in educational travel and experiential learning. Since it was founded in 1964, the company has expanded to provide a wide range of programs for more than 550,000 students annually to over 100 countries around the world.

During a breakout session at Sitecore Symposium 2024, Lynne DeRoche, SVP, Group Marketing, WorldStrides, and Richard Cabral, Principal Platform Architect, Verndale, discussed how the organization realized its ‘Project Unity’ vision of consolidating its tech stack.

Following a series of acquisitions, WorldStrides was looking for a streamlined way to manage 12 different legacy brands, multiple tour delivery systems and CRMs, 30 websites, and 15 programs that supported 400,000 students traveling every year.

Eager to simplify and unify its tech stack, WorldStrides needed a solution capable of rapidly delivering its messaging in a unified, collaborative way.

To achieve their ‘Project Unity’ vision, WorldStrides focused on three key goals:

• Consolidate WorldStrides’ tech stack for sales, CRM, pricing, reservation, and fulfillment engine across multiple product lines.
• Centralize marketing assets and content across all distribution channels.
• Merge content and commerce data for consumption by downstream systems.

Working together, WorldStrides and Verndale built a business-specific headless content model, with Content Hub as the central creation and distribution point for digital marketing content across all channels.

Content Hub’s unique data schema and ability to create highly flexible data entry screens allowed for a uniquely specialized content authoring experience.

A single source of truth

With Content Hub, they were able to create a ‘single source of truth’ and provide headless delivery across platforms, finalize photography and graphics, create program marketing content and destination marketing content including text and images.

Google Gemini for asset metadata

With thousands of images to maintain, Verndale connected Content Hub to Google Gemini for image analysis.

Using a custom action and the Gemini JSON API, they were able to achieve extremely accurate Gemini results formatted to automatically populate text and taxonomy fields on the analyzed asset and minimal human editing was required for this generative AI output.

Now seamlessly distributing digital assets and rich marketing content across business systems using Content Hub integrated with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WorldStrides is equipped to manage:

Wrapping up the session and reflecting on WorldStrides’ digital transformation journey, Richard Cabral, Principal Platform Architect, Verndale shared advice for organizations planning a similar digital transformation, highlighting the need for teams to dedicate sufficient time to content design for PIM and PCM. He also underlined the important role of testing and encouraged the use of generative AI where possible to scale tasks.

Discover more about the benefits of a content hub for your organization and how effective digital asset management can transform efficiency and productivity for marketing teams.