Designing and delivering a bespoke Continuous Professional Development platform that scaled with Solace’s membership, assessment needs, and operational requirements.
Solace (The Society of Local Authority Chief Executives) is the UK’s leading membership body for senior public sector leaders, representing more than 1,600 members nationwide.
In 2018, Solace needed a robust, secure, and scalable way to deliver Continuous Professional Development (CPD) to its members—while maintaining assessment integrity, tracking progress, and providing meaningful feedback at both individual and organisational levels.
Arise GTM designed and built a custom CPD assessment platform on WordPress, tightly integrated with Solace’s existing systems. The platform has now been in continuous use and evolving for over eight years, supporting thousands of assessments and remaining core to Solace’s member value proposition.
Solace required more than a learning portal.
Key challenges included:
Off-the-shelf learning platforms could not meet these requirements without heavy compromise.
The platform needed to be simple to use, despite the underlying complexity.
Deliver structured CPD assessments at scale
Support multi-dimensional question frameworks
Automatically score and assess responses
Generate personalised feedback reports for members
Feed insight back to the organisation
Integrate cleanly into the existing Solace website
Rather than forcing Solace into a generic LMS or plugin-heavy solution, Arise GTM designed the platform around the assessment logic first, not the CMS.
The platform was built to prioritise:
WordPress was used as the delivery layer, not the constraint.
We audited the entire onboarding flow and categorised each step into:
This exposed how much friction was being imposed before users reached their first meaningful outcome.
The longevity of the platform is the outcome: it solved the right problem, in the right way.
“…considered advice and support that’s been tailored to the needs of our business.”
Paul is a natural leader with great communication skills, sharp mind, and good business sense. I’ve always felt his advice was refreshing, well-considered, and tailored to our needs. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend him.
Victoria Barton-Rosenthal Marketing Manager, Solace
If you need a custom digital platform that supports assessment, insight, and long-term adoption, we design systems that last.