Case Study: The Data Lab grows a 2,400‑member data & AI community and 50+ mentoring pairs in one year with Hivebrite

How The Data Lab nurtures Scotland’s data and AI talent

The Data Lab, Scotland’s innovation center for data and AI, needed an accessible online space to connect professionals, foster skills and collaboration, and scale mentoring across sectors. To meet this challenge it selected Hivebrite as its community engagement platform, notably using Hivebrite’s Mentoring Module to create structured mentoring opportunities and subgroup-specific programs for members at different experience levels.

The Data Lab partnered with Hivebrite to build and launch its community (after a 200+ member pilot) and to run a mentoring program from scratch using Hivebrite’s Mentoring Module. In one year the community grew from 0 to 2,400 members across more than 80 industries and 50 countries, and over 50 mentoring pairs were established in under a year; the platform’s ease of use and low manual maintenance also made scaling straightforward.

The Data Lab

Paul McMillan

Community Manager