At ACEVO, one of the most valued benefits we offer our members is access to our online Community – a space for charity and social enterprise leaders to connect, ask questions, and offer peer support. Since its launch in April 2020, the ACEVO Community has become a vibrant, trusted digital hub where members can share knowledge and find solidarity with people who understand the realities of leading in our sector.
As more organisations look to develop online spaces for their members, we’re often asked how we built ours, what worked (and didn’t), and what keeps it going five years on. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at our journey – from set-up to lessons learned – and a few tips that might help if you’re thinking of launching something similar.
The purpose behind the platform
We created the ACEVO Community to make it easier and faster for members to connect with each other. It’s a space where leaders can ask questions, share experiences, and support one another, especially around issues that cannot be easily Googled. The platform is designed to be peer-led, with a simple interface that allows members to post, reply, like, message, and join groups.
When a new member joins ACEVO, they’re automatically given access to the Community, where they receive a daily digest of posts (with the option to change this to weekly or opt out altogether).
The ACEVO Community is an incredible resource – a real community in action, with CEOs helping each other solve all kinds of strategic, policy and operational questions. Worth the membership fee for this alone, but there are so many other benefits too. (Martin Pollard, CEO, Primary Science Teaching Trust)
The tech and set-up
- CRM and platform: We use Salesforce as our CRM, with a membership management tool called Fonteva. The Community is built using Fonteva’s off-the-shelf Community package, which we’ve customised with our branding.
- Timing: We launched in April 2020 – right at the start of the pandemic – and the timing couldn’t have been better. Members were in urgent need of connection, support and peer advice.
- Soft launch: We started small, inviting a core group of members to help us test the platform and create some early content. This meant that when we opened it up to the full membership, the space already felt lived-in and useful.
I would not be able to do my job as effectively without ACEVO – and especially the online Community. Being a CEO can be at times lonely, confusing and stressful. The ACEVO Community has helped me on many occasions to unlock a knotty issue, and to find a way forward as members are so generous with sharing their insights and advice. The Community is somewhere where I feel safe to share concerns and problems, and so often it turns out that others are facing exactly the same issues! I never feel alone with the Community alongside me! (Isobel Hunter, CEO, Libraries Connected)
Getting internal buy-in
One of the things that made our launch successful was treating it as a full team effort. We created a rota and asked staff to sign up to ‘monitor the Community’ during set morning or afternoon slots. Their role included:
- Flagging any posts where a member seemed to be in distress
- Adding tags to posts to improve searchability
- Sharing unanswered posts again
- Nudging someone (staff or member) to respond if they had relevant expertise
- Deleting inappropriate content (though, five years in, we’ve never had to)
This monitoring system ran successfully for the first three years and helped embed the Community into our culture and practice. Now that the platform is more self-sustaining, we no longer use the rota.
We also encouraged staff to engage in the Community – but with a light touch. It’s a member-to-member space, so we limit ourselves to one staff post per day.
Setting the tone: the six golden rules
To help create a welcoming and safe environment, we launched the Community with six clear principles:
- Welcoming
- Respectful
- Focused
- Supportive
- Confidential
- Peer to peer
These simple rules have stood the test of time and given us a helpful framework to fall back on if someone ever misuses the platform.
What helped the Community grow
- Early investment in content: Asking early adopters to post and engage gave us a solid base of content at launch.
- Searchable archive: Every post since April 2020 has been saved, so the search bar alone is a goldmine of knowledge and peer insight.
- ‘How to’ video: We made a short explainer video to show members how to use the platform and make the most of it.
- Daily digests: Members get a daily email summarising the previous day’s posts (they can opt for weekly instead).
- Celebrating champions: We shout out top Community users each month and highlight the top ten annually in our most-read newsletter, Leader to Leader (L2L), that goes out to our members every week.
Once again ACEVO and the community has helped me find practical advice and wisdom in a very short space of time. It’s much appreciated and a real life-line for me. (Lucy Emmerson, CEO, Sex Education Forum)
What hasn’t worked (yet)
Groups. We had high hopes that members would use Groups to form sub-communities based on interests, geography or specialisms. While a few have taken off, most haven’t seen much activity, even those requested by members. It’s something we continue to revisit and refine.
What’s next?
Now that all new members are automatically signed up to the Community, we’ve switched off engagement scoring for this benefit. We’re now working on a new way to measure real engagement: tracking activity, usefulness, and reach, rather than just access.
Final thoughts
The ACEVO Community has become an integral part of our member offer. It’s a space that’s rich in support, insight and solidarity. If you’re building something similar, our biggest piece of advice would be to treat it as a cultural project, not just a tech one. The platform is important, but it’s the people and the way you encourage, celebrate and support them that will bring it to life.