National School Choice Week (NSCW) is one of the most widely recognized education programs in the United States. Each January, the organization empowers millions of families to explore K–12 schooling options. This includes everything from public, charter, and magnet schools, to private, online, and homeschooling. With more than 132,000 schools represented nationwide, their website plays a central role in helping families make informed decisions about their children’s education.
When NSCW engaged Crowd Favorite, their platform was unstable, slow, and vulnerable during peak usage. With only a one-person technical department supporting a national initiative, they needed a dedicated partner who could step in quickly, restore confidence, and build a long-term digital foundation capable of supporting massive annual traffic spikes.
The Challenge
A Critical Platform Unable to Support a National Event
As awareness for NSCW grew each year, the system became increasingly strained. During their flagship annual event, when families most depend on their site, the platform crashed.
They were facing two urgent issues:
1. An Unstable, Underperforming Website
As it was, the site lacked the performance, reliability, and structure needed to support the increasing spikes from the increase in the organization’s national visibility. With limited internal resources, NSCW needed a partner who could serve as an extension of their team.
2. A Massive Data and Search Problem
With a dataset of 132,000 schools, the previous search architecture attempted to process the entire nationwide database with every user query, causing slow load times and system instability. Families could not get the fast, accurate results they needed.
Our Approach
Crowd Favorite began by stepping back with NSCW to look at the bigger picture, focusing on the performance needs of the organization’s platform, what their long-term goals demanded, and what was preventing them from getting there.
From there, we applied the same enterprise methodology we bring to every project: we analyzed how information moved through the system, where friction points slowed users down, and what foundational improvements would create the greatest impact. Through this process, we identified opportunities that enabled a better path forward for NSCW and a far stronger foundation for their mission.
Throughout the project, we acted as trusted advisors, guiding NSCW through decisions that shaped the direction of their platform and aligned with their long-term vision. Our ability to support them in this way comes from decades of enterprise experience and a deep understanding of what it takes to build systems that stand up to real-world demand.
The Outcome
The result is a platform built to support the full weight of NSCW’s national visibility. We strengthened its performance, modernized its data structure, and created an experience that responds instantly to the needs of families searching for schools.
- Built a Data Architecture Designed for National-Scale Demand: We re-architected how the platform stores and retrieves data, organizing the 132,000 locations into smarter, state-based collections and redesigning how search requests interact with them. This required rethinking the data model, query patterns, and caching strategy so the system could handle national demand without sacrificing accuracy. The result is a backend designed specifically for NSCW and that eliminates the heavy nationwide queries that caused slowdowns and outages.
- Engineered a Smarter, Faster Search Experience: We rebuilt the search experience so it could deliver accurate results instantly, even during extreme traffic spikes. Instead of forcing the system to process all 132,000 schools at once, we designed a smarter lookup process that only retrieves the information each user needs. Families can now explore school options quickly, reliably, and without friction.
- Enabled Easy, Independent Data Management: We built a simple update workflow that allows NSCW’s one-person technical team to refresh school information quickly, without relying on developers or navigating complex tools.
- Improved Overall Platform Quality: Through targeted fixes and cleanup of legacy code, the platform now scores 90/100 in Lighthouse.
Key Results
Supporting a Nationwide Movement with Enterprise Stability
Exceptional Performance During NSCW 2024
With proactive preparation and a rebuilt foundation:
- 2400% increase in site views compared to the prior 30 days
- 6000% increase in traffic over the six-month average
- Zero downtime during their most important week
Operational Efficiency for a Small Internal Team
- Data updates reduced from hours to minutes
- Streamlined workflows supported long-term maintainability
- Reduced reliance on external vendors
Higher User Confidence
- Instant search speeds
- More accurate school matching
- Faster load times
- Reliable experience at any traffic volume
A Long-Term Digital Foundation
- 2400% increase in site views compared to the prior 30 days
- 6000% increase in traffic over the six-month average
- Zero downtime during their most important week
Why Crowd Favorite
National School Choice Week needed a partner who understood the demands of mission-driven, high-impact digital platforms.
Crowd Favorite brings decades of experience building stable, high-performance digital ecosystems for organizations operating at national and global scales. Our approach is rooted in collaboration, transparency, and a deep commitment to our clients’ long-term success.
We go far beyond fixing immediate problems. We build systems that scale with an organization’s ambitions, empower internal teams, and create stability that lasts.
Crowd Favorite supported NSCW beyond the initial launch, providing ongoing maintenance and strategic improvements that kept the platform fast, stable, and dependable during their highest-visibility moments. Today, that same level of long-term partnership is available through our Digital Support Services program, which gives organizations the confidence and continuity needed to maintain mission-critical platforms.
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