Scale Up Scotland
Web Platform Building Community to Support Scotland's Entrepreneurs
Creating a Community of Like-minded Organisations
Scale Up Scotland is a not-for-profit organisation focused on helping businesses with high growth potential transition from startup to scaleup. It provides business leaders with resources and a community of like-minded organisations.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, we helped ScaleUp Scotland respond to the new challenges they faced and build an online space for peer-to-peer discussion accessed by business leaders across Scotland and beyond.
Over the years I have been involved in project management of a broad range of strategic initiatives, and I have learnt that the underlying success of a project comes down to the people. The whole team needs to have shared goals and vision, mutual respect, transparency and a desire to provide their best work. That is exactly what I’ve seen throughout my experience with GearedApp.
A Digital-First Approach to Online Learning
The Scale Up platform provides insights, guidance, and tools to help business leaders navigate their way through the challenges they face running a scaling organisation. Users can delve into a range of video content on any topic, from snippets of information to full modules on specific topic areas. Flexibility is key to providing the right learning and support at the right time, from anywhere in the world.
Peer-to-Peer Learning
A key aspect of growing is learning from the experience of others. For that reason it was crucial to create a space for the Scale Up community to discuss their own challenges and solutions.
Our discussion forums allow users to engage with fellow participants and build their network of like-minded peers. Users can share questions with the entire network, respond, comment and “clap” their favourite responses.
Our Headless CMS Tech Stack
We used a Headless CMS approach, with React (CRA) on the front end and with Strapi for content management. Strapi is an advanced, open-source headless CMS. The backend services and storage were based on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This approach future-proofs the tech stack, Allowing us to build in components or modules so we can make changes to the platform going forward, without any downtime on the front end.
What's Next for Scale Up Scotland
The Scale Up Scotland digital platform has recently been launched and is in its growth stage. Feedback has been hugely positive in terms of design, and users of the platform doubled within two days of Scale Up Scotland’s PR campaign. The platform hopes to be the first port of call for those scaling up, serving not just the central belt of Scotland but those in remote communities.
Using collaboration, transparency and flexibility, the Scale Up Scotland platform is a means of providing support to business leaders across Scotland. The platform is helping to encourage growth, turnover, investment and job creation in businesses scaling up.