ENRICH GLOBAL ensuring the sustainability of projects in which it is involved, at no additional cost
Most project support ends when the project closes. Partners usually can not do work outside the project boundaries. ENRICH GLOBAL keeps and promote project communities and the digital tools (dashboards, forms, databases, repositories, knowledge graphs…) online for at least five years post-project, without additional cost.
Project leaders have dreamt of this for years. ENRICH GLOBAL and its members made it happen.
The project cliff: the funding stops, and the community and its digital tools disappear with it
Every funded project produces more than deliverables. Over the years it builds a community and, alongside it, digital tools: dashboards, databases, matchmaking tools, document collections, online exhibitions. Together they are often the most valuable result of the project, and the first to disappear after it ends.
The sequence is well known. The project website is frozen. The community goes quiet. The dashboards and tools go offline with the server that hosted them. Deliverables become hard to find. Many proposals promise that “the platform, along with its ecosystem, will be maintained by the partners”, yet without a valid business model it stops working.
The ENRICH GLOBAL commitment
With ENRICH GLOBAL, the project community and its digital tools are set up on the CONNECT hub, the collaboration and community platform that ENRICH GLOBAL runs with its members. ENRICH GLOBAL commits to keep them online for a minimum of five years after the end of the project, without additional cost to the consortium.
The commitment covers hosting on servers located in the European Union and operated by the ENRICH GLOBAL tech team; maintenance: security updates, monitoring, and the continuous evolution of the platform; backups of all community data; and user support for community administrators.
No budget line is needed for this post-project. ENRICH GLOBAL makes it possible because the association and its members already run the infrastructure for their own work and care about the sustainability of results for European communities and innovation. This is fully in line with the mission of ENRICH GLOBAL: taking European innovation global, and vice versa.
Why there is no additional cost
The CONNECT hub is a proprietary platform ENRICH GLOBAL designed, built and operates on its own infrastructure. All communities run on the same shared platform. Hosting, maintenance and backups are already provided for the whole platform: one more community adds almost nothing to that cost. Features built for one community are shared with all others: there is no double funding.
The platform is maintained because ENRICH GLOBAL and its members use it every day for their own communities, thematic groups and events. A project community and its tools simply continue to benefit from an infrastructure that the association keeps alive in any case.
There are no third-party licence fees, no per-usage pricing, no commercial provider whose terms might change. Each community owns its data. The CONNECT hub is GDPR compliant and hosted in Europe, its features are developed in line with the AI Act, and there is no advertising and no cookies beyond those that improve the user experience.
The business model has been successfully implemented. ENRICH GLOBAL operates its own Project Sustainability Fund, decided yearly by the Board and fed by a defined share of the association’s own resources. The Fund covers hosting, security and technical maintenance of the eligible platforms and digital results for the five-year post-project period, at low and predictable marginal cost. At the end of a project, ENRICH GLOBAL assigns a named maintainer within its permanent team. Full details are provided to ENRICH GLOBAL members and consortium partners.
What “still online” means for the community and its digital tools
A community kept alive on the CONNECT hub stays a working space, and its tools keep working with it. Five years after the project end, members can still use both (updates are possible under a specific agreement; members can propose reasonable updates for the ENRICH GLOBAL team to implement). Community administrators keep their role: they can publish news, announce events, welcome new members or open a group for a new initiative. The community stays as active as its members want it to be. Thematic communities span projects and initiatives: in some cases, six projects of our members have followed one another and expanded the same community for the benefit of all.
For projects that used the virtual fair, the online exhibition stays available too: booths and project outcomes remain accessible as a permanent showcase, provided at least one virtual fair was run under one of the projects of ENRICH GLOBAL (to cover the cost of the external virtual fair platform, with no margin taken).
Who moderates after the project?
An online community also needs to stay trustworthy. On the CONNECT hub, moderation continues after the project ends. Every community is (co)moderated by ENRICH GLOBAL, under the lead of one of its members or of the project partners. Partners who wish to stay involved keep their administrator rights. The platform’s built-in validation workflowsupports this. Projects that cannot continue moderation can merge their communities with existing ones, subject to agreement with the moderators and administrators of the community and its tools. We make the process seamless.
Communities and digital tools that outlived their projects
The CONNECT hub already hosts 3,400+ people and their digital tools across 12+ communities created by European and international projects and initiatives, alongside the thematic communities run by ENRICH GLOBAL members. Several were set up during a funded action and continue well beyond it, with members still joining, news published and events organised.
Technical team: kudos!
Behind this work stands the senior tech and AI team of the association, lead developers of several European and worldwide platforms built over many years. Each lead member has 20+ years of experience: the team leader, Fabrice Clari, has coordinated European projects and understands well what is needed; the lead developer, Cedrik Poirey, has worked 20+ years in innovative projects, including as CTO of two start-ups. For both Fabrice and Cedrik, that represents more than 20 years dedicated to software development and team management, serving technological innovation in multiple areas of application with passion and enthusiasm.
Working together
Contact us or discover the CONNECT hub.
Interested? Join ENRICH GLOBAL. We do not charge membership fees: we co-create the association with in-kind input of the members.
