Building An EdTech Platform On Drupal To Increase Net Profit Up To 6 Numbers

An educational company* based in New York used to be focus on providing teachers with supplements for their classes. Even before COVID-19 and online classes that got global and popular, the company was trying to go digital in therms of their supplements. The platform the had was developed in AEM and just offered teachers a way to pay for their supplements, but not use them online. Our task was to reintroduce the platform to allow teacher not only to pay for their supplements, but also use them online.

* The project is under NDA so we can’t mention the name of the company

The believed that an efficient solution that would save the company their budget and allow to generate more revenue by simply providing teachers with an opportunity to use their supplements online was Drupal. This CMS takes into consideration a lot of technical details that need to be resolved before starting developing the product such as different roles or users and their permissions, content creation, management, distributing and integration, advanced visualisation, day-to-day services integrations (for example, email or payment ones). The elements listed above are usually ready to use in Drupal — some of them do need some initial set-up, but you do not have to develop anything from scratch. Only the smallest number of tasks needs to be done in a custom way and is totally up to the level of customisation you would like to have.

After developing the platform itself with all the elements listed above, we also decided to introduce a new content management tool as the business model of the company was mostly based on providing teachers with content online. Our team introduced new advanced content creation forms that had a lot on common with WordPress and AEM solutions as the company used to work with these CMS. On the other hand, they were much simpler to use for editors and provided them with some hints regarding creating and distributing their content. We also automated and simplified working with images and videos elements by using this tool so editors could post and edit these elements in the easiest way. This solution was brought both by already made solution presented in Drupal and the level of customisation that we managed to bring by combining them together.

Even though Drupal is considered to be quite heavy and slow in terms of performance, it all comes down to the optimisation. As a result, we managed to achieve the following results:

• We optimised Drupal so it would not load up the website, but would be able to undergo a lot of users and work without being down.

• The team intended to work and support on the website decreased by 20% as the solution did not need a lot of developers to maintain it in the future.

• The company was able to attract more clients and go global, especially during and after pandemic when online education became a trend.

• The net profit of the company during the first year after rebuilding the platform came out as a 6 figure number in US dollar.