Community Energy England website
Community Energy England is the national voice for the community energy sector. Among it’s many roles, it’s a membership organisation, policy advocate, knowledge hub and campaigner.
Based on the strength of work we’ve achieved within the community energy sector, including for Low Carbon Hub over the last decade, and our reputation for friendly, insightful collaboration, we were asked to redesign and build their website.
This brief then developed (and continues to develop) into a wider mission to strategically and technically improve how CEE engage with and support their members.
CEE’s work is wide-ranging. It represents hundreds of local community energy organisations, hosts webinars and forums, publicises funding and share offer listings, publishes State of the Sector research, advocates on policy and runs national campaigns.
The previous site had grown organically to accommodate all of this, but had grown unwieldy, and lacked a structure to allow for easy exploration and content discovery.
The CMS was also beginning to creak and was increasingly hard to work with.
The remit was to build a platform that belonged to the members as much as to CEE themselves. A place for collaboration, not just information.
Our starting point was a full information architecture rethink. We hosted workshops using Figjam to map content, audiences and user needs and journeys. The remit was to build a platform that belonged to the members as much as to CEE themselves. A place for collaboration, not just information.
We paid particular attention to the membership offering, which we were to take online for the first time.
We designed and built a full self-serve membership platform, based around an integration with CEE’s existing CRM. This gives members the ability to manage their own accounts, renewals and preferences without staff intervention. Planning the membership journeys carefully at the outset, in close collaboration with the CEE team, creating and testing prototypes, meant we could get the logic right before writing a line of code.
We also brainstormed functionality and features for members that would make membership more enticing and valuable. This includes a better, more visually-enticing members map, filterable by service and technology, as well as member-only content and how-to guides.
The project also included a rebrand, delivered in partnership with design studio 400. DIAS managed that relationship end-to-end, and then interpreted and implemented the new brand for the site, translating the clean, bold identity into something that could work across all the various content types, without losing coherence.
The site launched in November 2025 to much praise from CEE themselves and their members.
We continue to work closely with CEE on an ongoing basis, with a planned roadmap of exciting new functionality to come!