Case Study: Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations achieves improved search relevancy and unified content delivery with Elastic

Charity sector data strategy and innovation with Elasticsearch

The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) is the national membership body for Scotland’s charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises, representing 2,000+ members. Faced with a fragmented portfolio of sites built in different languages and stacks (WordPress, ASP.NET, PHP/MySQL) and a strategic move to centralise data in Salesforce, SCVO struggled with poor, inconsistent site search and the maintenance overhead of multiple systems.

SCVO consolidated public content onto an Elasticsearch‑based platform hosted on Elastic Cloud, using a Node.js indexer and a router (with Handlebars templates) to ingest from Salesforce, WordPress and APIs and serve unified content across sites. The change delivered far more relevant search (including “similar” content and geo searches), increased site search usage, lower bounce rates and positive user feedback (notably the “Similar Jobs” feature), while reducing ops burden and enabling faster front‑end development.

Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations

Calum MacÙisdean

Web Development & Design Manager