Uplift Community
A community org's site, run by its own team
About Uplift Community
Uplift Community (Uplift Adult and Youth CIC) is a community interest company in Birmingham running adult and youth services: workshops, gatherings and programmes that bring people together. It is grant-funded, backed by partners including the National Lottery Community Fund, Birmingham City Council and the local NHS trust, the kind of organisation whose website has to stay current on a volunteer's time, not a developer's.
Objectives
- Give Uplift's team a site they can keep current themselves, with no developer on call.
- Let them manage the things that change: events, news, programmes and the weekly schedule.
- Show the community in pictures with a gallery the team uploads to.
- Turn interest into contact: membership, enquiry and newsletter sign-ups that reach the inbox.
- Make the organisation fast to load and easy to find.
The Challenge
A community organisation like Uplift changes constantly, events, programmes and news move every week, but it runs on the time of staff and volunteers, not developers. A website that needs a developer for every edit falls behind, and a site that is out of date makes an active organisation look closed. Uplift needed one its own team could keep current, and that would still be fast and easy to find.
The Approach
The key decision was to split the site by how often each part changes. The stable pages (who they are, their policies, their partners) are built into the site; everything that moves (events, news, programmes, the weekly schedule and the photo gallery) is content the team edits from an admin, and the public pages rebuild themselves on a schedule to pick the changes up. So the team touches content, never code, and the live site is never more than half an hour behind an edit.
The Solution
The public site is a fast set of pages that refresh themselves on a schedule. Behind a single admin login, the team writes and publishes events, blog posts, homepage programmes and the weekly schedule, and uploads photos to the gallery, with the live pages picking up each change on their own. Membership, contact and newsletter forms capture to a database and email the team, with spam kept out.
Built on Next.js and React, with the editable content in Contentful (a headless CMS) and the gallery and form submissions in Supabase. Pages are statically rendered and revalidate every 30 minutes, so they stay fast and search-friendly while still reflecting the team's edits, and structured data, a sitemap and image optimisation are built in so the organisation is easy to find.
Content the team keeps current
Events, news, homepage programmes and the weekly schedule are all edited from an admin and published straight to the live site, with no developer in the loop. Add an event and it turns up on the homepage and the events page within the hour. The things a community organisation changes every week are the things its own team controls.
- Events, blog posts, programmes and the weekly schedule, all editable
- Edits publish to the live pages on their own, within the hour
- The team writes content, and never touches code
A gallery the team uploads to
The moments that make the community (events, workshops, the people who show up) go into a photo gallery the team uploads to directly. Photos publish to a masonry grid, and anything taken down goes to a trash it can be restored from, so a mistaken delete is never final.
- The team uploads photos straight from the admin
- Published to a masonry gallery on the live site
- Deletes go to a restorable trash, not gone for good
Turning interest into contact
Membership, contact and newsletter sign-ups each capture to a database and email the team, so an enquiry never sits unseen. Applicants get a confirmation, the team gets notified, and every form is guarded so the inbox stays people, not bots.
- Membership, contact and newsletter, each stored and emailed
- Applicants get a confirmation; the team gets notified
- Honeypot and rate-limiting keep spam out
Email is best-effort: if a notification fails to send, the submission is still saved rather than lost, so a flaky mail server never costs the organisation an enquiry. The cost is that a rare failed email has to be caught in the admin, where every submission is also listed.
Built to be found
A community organisation only helps the people who can find it. The site ships with the structured data search engines read for organisations, a sitemap, fast self-refreshing pages and optimised images, so Uplift turns up when someone searches for support nearby, and loads quickly when they do.
Technologies
Conclusion
Uplift Community now runs on a site its own team keeps alive: events go up, photos go up, sign-ups come in, all without a developer, and the public pages stay fast and findable. The website moves at the pace of the organisation.
Have a project in mind? Let's talk