Multisite Offers for MATs: What Are the Benefits?

Having worked with a wide variety of MATs over the years, we understand the importance of ensuring a consistent brand is applied efficiently across the whole Trust and academies within it. A key element of this consistency is maintaining a central identity across all websites associated within the Trust. This is where our multisite offer comes in.

What is a Multisite Offer?

Our Digital Team is experienced in working with MATs to create stylish and easy-to-navigate websites which can be applied not just to the Trust itself or one single academy, but rolled out simply across the whole organisation.

Once a central template has been created for the website, this can easily be copied and adjusted for each academy. This ensures that the structure of the site and central information remain the same, while academy-specific information and identities can be easily swapped out.

Demonstrate Unity

An obvious benefit of engaging with a multisite offer is the ease of ensuring brand consistency. Using a central website template ensures that all websites across the Trust have the same layout and feel, emphasising unity throughout the organisation. This demonstrates to users from the sites alone that academies throughout the Trust belong to the same organisation.

In addition to this, multisite projects make it easier for websites within the Trust to link through to each other. Not only does this demonstrate the connections within the organisation, linking websites together like this improves Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), meaning that your organisation is more likely to come up in internet searches.

Increase Efficiency

Site Build

Using a single website template across the Trust eliminates the need to build each website from scratch, reducing the time and cost associated with redesigning sites across the organisation. Not only is the site structure automatically transferred, but so is any central information which is the same across all academies, such as policies and uniform. This means that information does not have to be duplicated but any school-specific pages can be easily adjusted.

Finding Information

As well as increasing efficiency around build time, multisite projects make navigating your sites easier for users, as information is laid out in the same way on each site. This can also include linking from each site to central portals, for current staff for example, meaning the same information can be found just as easily regardless of which site the user happens to be on.

Demonstrate Professionalism

When prospective staff or families are searching for your organisation, one of the first things they are likely to do is browse your website(s). Consistent and organised sites demonstrate the professionalism of your Trust, making you a more attractive option for those considering whether to join your community.

Support Growth

As Trusts are looking to take on more academies or even absorb smaller Trusts, it is more important than ever to make this growth as efficient as possible. Multisite projects lay essential foundations which make adding multiple new academy websites quick and easy, making it straightforward to incorporate new academies into the Trust with minimum hassle.

Examples of our existing multisite projects include those for:

Visit the above sites to see the benefits of our multisite offer in action!

If you would like to talk to us about establishing a multisite project for your Trust, please contact us.