Sustaining e-learning activities in relation to lesser-used European languages led to the identification of new e-tools as services to support learning. Development requires resource investigation, however, and the influences and interactions of EU policies and programmes at a regional level are very significant. Through an informal matching process, a joint initiative to develop online language tools for Welsh and Irish was formed. The context, regional influences, difficulties and solutions are described below.

The application area is unusual in that it affects database applications applied to languages, but seven general project development lessons are transferable and highlighted. Networking across initiatives offers multiple ways of developing e-learning and, on a regional basis, there is sufficient information to enable a suitable fit to be made with relevant initiatives. Political awareness of project staff is necessary to gather a degree of political support in order to facilitate cooperation between the project partners and government organisations. Transnational team-building should embrace different levels of staff to enable them to communicate easily about problem; therefore, the interface needs to be designed so that it can be updated easily in response to user needs. Marketing promotion can be effective in various forms, such as maintaining and updating a fresh and attractive website that will attract enquiries and international registrations from the Internet; holding special promotional events that are planned to coincide with course development milestones; and arranging a “drip-feed” of local news stories to stimulate interest and maintain the flow of registrations. Monitoring of the website provides a quick, precise and accurate indication of the effect of marketing promotion. Finally, evaluation is one of the most important tasks and needs to be scheduled from day one of the initiative. Emphasis is placed on capturing as much developmental information as possible, including the unexpected and planned outcomes. Features for evaluation included social and cultural needs, the learning support environment, and management. Effective evaluation can generate findings and, together with suitable dissemination, these are important tools for sustaining an innovation dynamic.