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Case Study: Long-Term Digital Platform Partnership

How Arise GTM Built and Evolved a Custom CPD Platform Used by Solace for Over 8 Years.

Designing and delivering a bespoke Continuous Professional Development platform that scaled with Solace’s membership, assessment needs, and operational requirements.

Desktop Mockup Solace

Overview

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.

The Challenge

Solace required more than a learning portal.

Key challenges included:

  • Delivering question-based CPD assessments aligned to leadership competencies
  • Capturing structured responses across multiple dimensions
  • Scoring answers by proficiency level (low/medium/high)
  • Providing individualised feedback to members upon completion
  • Supplying organisations with insight into skill gaps and development needs
  • Tracking course completion accurately
  • Ensuring usability for senior leaders, not just digital natives

Off-the-shelf learning platforms could not meet these requirements without heavy compromise.

Solace

Objectives

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

The Strategic Breakthrough

"CPD value comes from insight and feedback — not content delivery alone."
User_Experience_Design

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:

  • Assessment quality
  • Feedback clarity
  • Ease of progression
  • Data integrity

WordPress was used as the delivery layer, not the constraint.

Our Approach

1. Custom Assessment Architecture

We audited the entire onboarding flow and categorised each step into:

  • Value-critical
  • Value-adjacent
  • Non-critical at activation

This exposed how much friction was being imposed before users reached their first meaningful outcome.

Office Work

2. Member Experience Design

  • Simple, guided assessment flow
  • Clear progress tracking
  • Intuitive completion experience aligned with Solace’s existing UX

3. Automated Feedback & Reporting

  • Generated personalised CPD feedback reports for each participant
  • Delivered insight into skill gaps and development priorities
  • Provided organisations with aggregated visibility

4. Seamless Website Integration

  • Integrated the platform directly into Solace’s WordPress environment
  • Ensured assessments and results were linked to member profiles
  • Avoided unnecessary complexity or third-party dependencies

5. Long-Term Evolution

  • Delivered the initial platform within 4 weeks
  • Continued to support, refine, and evolve the platform over time
  • Adapted functionality as Solace’s CPD programmes and member needs matured

Results

  •  

  • 8+ years of continuous platform usage
  • CPD platform embedded into Solace’s core member offering
  • Thousands of assessments completed since launch
  • High member adoption due to simplicity and relevance
  • Ongoing ability to evolve assessments without rebuilding the platform
  • Strong operational confidence in assessment data and feedback

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

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