HOLEX

Amplifying adult learning through online community

HOLEX is the leading representative body for Adult Community Education (ACE) and learning in the UK, supporting over 140 learning organisations, including local authority ACE services, Institutes for Adult Learning, and independent third-sector organisations.

To strengthen its mission of expertise-sharing and peer support, HOLEX sought to enhance how its membership connects, collaborates, and shares knowledge across the sector, while also improving its ability to draw on the collective expertise of its network to inform and influence policy discussions through a more structured and accessible digital environment.

The Challenge

For years, HOLEX relied on JISCMail discussion mailing lists to facilitate communication across its network. While effective for distributed conversation, the system offered limited structure for capturing, organising, and reusing knowledge over time.

Although an online archive existed, it was rarely used in practice due to limited usability and did not provide a meaningful mechanism for centralising or navigating shared resources. As a result, knowledge remained dispersed across individual inboxes and email threads, limiting visibility and long-term value.

Over time, this became a growing constraint on HOLEX’s ability to fully support its members, particularly in relation to networking, sharing sector knowledge and practice, and capturing insights that could inform and influence wider policy discussions.

As the organisation evolved, these limitations highlighted the need for a dedicated community platform that could support searchable knowledge-sharing and structured discussion, with a more modern user experience – enabling members to build on shared expertise in a more accessible and sustainable way, and to better surface the collective intelligence of the membership.

The Approach

The strategic shift focused on moving beyond email-based discussion toward a centralised, high-engagement model.

HOLEX had long admired Cantarus' Discourse community platform, recognising its strong functionality, user experience, and potential fit for the sector. However, this initial view had not yet been fully stress-tested against operational requirements or the wider market landscape.

Working with LJ Digital was essential to validating this direction – refining requirements, exploring alternative solutions, and testing assumptions across the broader digital ecosystem.

Crucially, this work extended beyond community platform selection alone. It helped shape a wider architectural view of HOLEX’s digital environment, ensuring alignment between the community platform, a complementary CRM, and a future-integrated website. This systems-led perspective confirmed that the Cantarus solution remained the most appropriate foundation for the community layer within a broader, joined-up digital infrastructure.

The methodology prioritised scalability, ease of use, and affordability. As a small non-profit operating in a significantly under-resourced sector, a key constraint was to ensure that any solution was not only robust and professional but also financially sustainable in the realities of long-term delivery.

The Project

The implementation was led by Cantarus, working closely with the HOLEX project team and utilising documentation and insight provided through LJ Digital. This collaborative approach ensured delivery remained aligned to the wider strategic vision for a connected digital ecosystem spanning community, CRM, and future website integration.

A key focus was establishing the Discourse-powered HOLEX Hub as the foundational community layer within this broader architecture. Rather than positioning it as a standalone tool, the implementation prioritised its role as the central space for member engagement, knowledge-sharing and peer support, with clear pathways for future integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and the organisation’s website platform.

Flexibility was critical in sequencing delivery. The community platform was launched ahead of full CRM implementation, enabling immediate value for members while the wider systems architecture was still being finalised. This ensured momentum was maintained and allowed early behavioural insight to inform subsequent integration work.

Through structured onboarding, live Q&A sessions, and a guided migration from the legacy JISCMail environment, members were supported in transitioning to the new platform quickly and confidently. The result was strong early engagement and a smooth adoption process, laying the groundwork for deeper system integration over time.

The Results

The HOLEX Hub achieved immediate scale. Within around three months of launch, 57% of members had visited the community, with over 20% of the total membership actively posting or interacting on the platform. Members also benefited from regular digests delivered directly to their email inboxes. This early adoption provided clear validation for the move to a modern community infrastructure.

Beyond the metrics, the project has helped centralise the sector’s expertise. Members now benefit from a more connected digital community where best practice can be shared, discussions are retained and built on over time, and resources are more easily discoverable. The transition from JISCMail to a dedicated community platform has addressed the limitations of fragmented communication and established a scalable foundation for HOLEX to continue supporting and amplifying the impact of adult learning across the UK.

Charlie McKenna, Business & Operations Manager, HOLEX:

“Transitioning from a legacy mailing list to a modern community platform was a significant step for HOLEX. We needed a solution that would provide a clear, intuitive framework to enable our members to communicate and share knowledge in a structured, accessible and reliable modern environment, alongside a partner who understood the context we operate in.

Having previously encountered the Cantarus platform, I had viewed it with something of a ‘rose-tinted’ optimism for several years, as it appeared to align closely with a vision of what I wanted to achieve for our network. Working with both Cantarus and LJ Digital helped us properly test and refine that thinking, ensuring the final approach was robust, practical, and fit for purpose.

While I was confident in the overall design of the digital ecosystem we had created, there were natural nerves in the early stages of implementation; that familiar voice of doubt that makes you wonder whether something will land well with members or perform as expected. I’m pleased to say that the HOLEX Hub has more than met those expectations and now clearly fills the gap we needed it to address."

The platform has given us a more structured and visible way for members to connect and share knowledge. Importantly, launching the community ahead of full CRM integration meant we were able to deliver value to members earlier than would otherwise have been possible within the wider programme of work. I’m genuinely delighted with what we have created.

Charlie McKenna Business & Operations Manager, HOLEX

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