Case Study: Teach First achieves a scalable, engaging online teacher community with Acquia

Teach First Improving Education through Collaboration

Teach First is an independent UK charity that places teachers in schools serving low-income communities to raise student achievement. With roughly 2,500 participants and 2,000 Ambassadors, the organisation faced a communications and engagement challenge: its proprietary community platform was poorly adopted, hard to manage and not scalable, making it difficult to share resources, best practices and feedback across a diverse network. Teach First wanted a single, user-friendly site that combined intranet and external community features and leveraged Drupal as the base CMS.

Working with BrightLemon and Acquia, Teach First selected and implemented Drupal Commons, migrated users with their privileges intact, and focused on search and usability during a soft launch. The new site unified communities, required no user training, and delivered measurable engagement gains—more blogs, higher comment volumes, increased event registrations, multi-device access and improved visibility into site traffic via unique user logins.

TeachFirst

Christopher Beales

Business Analyst and Project Manager