It has been just over a year since the Online Safety Act (2023) went into force in March 2025. As an innovation platform for employee ideas and enterprise grant funding with clear user-to-user interaction points in the UK, SimplyDo took proactive steps to address the general requirements of the act for cloud and SaaS products. This legislation requires a general overview of the act and what it means for companies like ours.

The Online Safety Act establishes a legal framework requiring digital service providers to mitigate exposure to prohibited or damaging material, prioritising the protection of minors under Ofcom's regulatory oversight. For SaaS platforms facilitating user interaction, this necessitates rigorous risk evaluations, robust moderation protocols, and enhanced reporting mechanisms to ensure compliance for services accessible to UK-based users.

The Act primarily pertains to services facilitating user-generated content, including those where users upload, share, or engage with material from others, as well as specific search functionalities. Within SaaS environments, this encompasses social and collaborative features such as community spaces, discussion forums, collaboration feeds, commenting systems, direct messaging, and marketplace listings.

We are committed not only to our own compliance but also to supporting our customers in meeting their obligations as they design and deliver their innovation workflows and programs.

Compliance

To achieve compliance with the Online Safety Act, SimplyDo implemented comprehensive measures across our operations:

Policy and Documentation

We established new policies and updated external documents, including our Terms and Conditions and privacy statement, alongside all new internal dedicated policies.

Risk Assessments

We conducted both illegal harms risk assessments and children's access assessments.

Reporting and Review

We created a dedicated content complaints and reporting process and built a comprehensive reporting framework across our platform. These processes, along with all policies and assessments, are subject to regular reviews and testing.

Staff Awareness

We implemented training for staff to ensure understanding and adherence to the new requirements.

Remaining Compliant and Helping Our Customers

SimplyDo's commitment to online safety is deeply integrated into our platform's architecture, particularly within our innovation clusters and 'groups' features, which are more obviously user-to-user. We have implemented robust content moderation and approval systems that go beyond simple reporting.

Specifically, we've established a dedicated content complaints and reporting process and built a comprehensive reporting framework across our platform. These tools are designed to empower customers to manage content submissions within their specific workflows, ensuring that all ideas and grant proposals, whether from a small internal group or a broad innovation cluster, are monitored for compliance with the Online Safety Act and their own organisational policies.

This feature set directly supports our goal to help our customers remain compliant in their own obligations as they use the SimplyDo platform to design and deliver their innovation workflows and programs.

Beyond this, our commitment to online safety is ongoing, focusing on both internal maintenance and external support. Going forward, SimplyDo will focus on the following:

Internal Maintenance

We will continue to maintain the technology to support compliance.

Ongoing Review

We will continue to regularly review the policies and assessments at regular intervals.

Staff Awareness

We will continue to raise staff awareness regarding the requirements of the act.

Customer Support

Crucially, we will help our customers remain compliant in their own obligations as they manage and use the SimplyDo platform.