The challenge

The Academy for Chief Executives is a membership organisation for UK based CEOs and Managing Directors who run businesses with a minimum turnover of £5m and at least 20 employees. The business is split into 30 franchise groups which are each headed up by Academy Chairs. As well as needing a new public facing website which aligned with the organisations new branding and marketing goals, each individual Academy Group required their own individual website which they could use to communicate more effectively with their local audiences.

The solution

After working with the ACE decision makers to distill how to best reflect the organisation, we created as series of visual mockups which outlined the direction of the site. These were well received and we set about developing a technically complex (but easy to administrate) central WordPress “multisite” setup with 30 individual group sub-sites built into the same installation. This allows the central team to administrate all the sites and the individual Chairs to edit their own sites, create their own local content and pull in global content from the central website. This involved a lot of bespoke development work as there wasn’t an existing solution for this kind of functionality. The feedback we have received since launch is that the public facing website is working well and that the administration of content on the central and sub-sites is very straightforward.

Benefits include