Addiction Recovery

Addiction Recovery is a content production company for addiction recovery centers. The company writes educational blog content, web pages, and email newsletters, all designed to help people through their recovery. Addiction Recovery found an important niche which was severely underserved, and gradually built up a client list of 50 different treatment centers across the United States.

With a team of about 60 writers and editors, Addiction Recovery created tailored content for each clinic – in total, the company was producing more than 500 articles every month. Unfortunately, scaling up their content creation came with serious challenges. At first, the Addiction Recovery team used Google Docs for its collaboration features, but they quickly outgrew it, along with other third party services.

When lead product manager, Tyler Cunningham, began looking into building a collaborative content management system (CMS) in-house, he knew the WYSIWYG editor would be the crucial component.

Addiction Recovery needed a rich text editor with:

After deciding to use CKEditor 5, Addiction Recovery built and rolled out the first version of their in-house CMS in just 3 months. Tyler says the integration and setup were extremely smooth, and the team loves CKEditor’s familiar Google Docs-style interface. “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,” he says.

Addiction Recovery has a distributed team, many of whom work in different time zones or countries. The ability to add comments makes it much easier for editors to leave feedback on drafts, while CKEditor’s Real-time Collaboration features mean people can work together no matter where in the world they are. In fact, the team quickly made CKEditor their main communication hub, replacing video calls and instant messages. As Tyler puts it, CKEditor “just works so well for us.”

One of the first things Tyler noticed after rolling out the new CKEditor-powered CMS was the way it sped up the writing and editing process. “CKEditor gives us a competitive advantage because we’re just able to do more with less time,” says Tyler. For the writers, that means “they can do 10 articles in the time that they would otherwise do 8,” he says. In other words, a 25% productivity boost.

With all that extra capacity, Addiction Recovery was able to expand its client list, taking on 12+ new recovery clinics in just a few months – and now, their CMS isn’t struggling to keep up. “We were able to do that because our team members can work more efficiently and get their jobs done quicker,” says Tyler.

Tyler is also impressed with the reliability and robustness of CKEditor, and says his team hasn’t experienced any outages or downtime, despite working with the editor across different time zones. On the rare occasions that Addiction Recovery’s developers need support, Tyler says they find everything they need in the documentation.

Asked to sum up his experience with CKEditor, Tyler says: “I would recommend using CKEditor to other cutting-edge companies, without a doubt. I would recommend it to anyone that needs a full-scale WYSIWYG editor with advanced features, like collaboration and comments. I haven’t used anything better.”