The Active Project: A Community Platform That 2x User Engagement
MD Robin Islam
The Active Project — A WordPress Community Platform That Doubled User Engagement
A WordPress community platform for an adaptive-sports nonprofit — combining an interactive member map, events, forums, and messaging into one space. The result: user engagement doubled, sessions 4x longer, and a community growing 2x month over month.
I led design and development end to end. Here's how a nonprofit got a digital home that finally felt like one.
100% Increase in engagement
4x Longer avg. session time
2x Monthly community growth
3-month Build timeline
Industries:
Nonprofit / Adaptive Sports
Stack:
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, custom code
Services:
Branding, Web Design, Web Development, Custom Software Development
Boomdevs brought our vision for The Active Project to life. They truly understood what we were trying to build and made it better than we imagined. Our community finally has a space that feels like home.
— Zeke Devisson, Executive Director, Kelly Brush Foundation
The mission behind the build
The Kelly Brush Foundation helps people with disabilities lead active lives — through adaptive sports, scholarships, grants, and custom equipment. They came to me with a goal that was simple to say and hard to build: give our community one connected place to find each other, discover events and resources, and stay engaged.
Not a website. A living community platform.
The real challenge
The brief packed an enormous range of features into one platform: an events system, partner-organization directory, classifieds, forums, user messaging, notifications, learning resources, and — the hardest piece — an interactive member map that lets people filter and find others, events, and partner orgs near them.
The challenge was twofold. First, integrate all of it on WordPress — a platform that doesn't natively do most of this. Second, make a feature-dense platform feel simple. With this much packed in, the easy outcome is an overwhelming mess. The whole project lived or died on navigation and UX.
How I built it
WordPress was the right foundation for the foundation's team to manage content long-term — but off-the-shelf plugins couldn't carry the load. So the approach was WordPress as the core, custom code where plugins fell short — specifically the event management system, the member map, and the messaging layer, all of which I built custom in PHP and JavaScript.
I ran the project in weekly sprints with the client, gathering requirements directly from their team, designing in Figma and Miro, then building and testing each functional area before moving to the next. The discipline mattered: connecting the member map, events, and forums into one seamless experience — without the UX fragmenting — took meticulous planning and a lot of testing.
The hard part
The toughest engineering problem was making distinct, complex systems feel like one product. A member map, a forum, an events engine, and a messaging system are effectively four different apps. Bolting them together on WordPress while keeping navigation intuitive — so a user never feels the seams — was the real work. That's where the custom code and the repeated UX testing earned their keep.
The outcome
The platform didn't just launch — it changed how the community behaves:
User engagement increased 100% — doubled
Average session time grew 4x — people stay and use it
The community is growing 2x every month
A nonprofit now has a genuine digital home, in their own words "a space that feels like home"
The best community platforms disappear — you stop noticing the software and just feel connected. That was the whole goal.
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Posted Sep 30, 2025
WordPress community platform for an adaptive-sports nonprofit — interactive member map, events & forums. Engagement 2x, sessions 4x longer. I led design & dev.
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Kelly Brush Foundation
