What Do You Need For A Great MAT Website?
A website for your Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) is an important part of your Trust. It establishes an online presence for your schools and can provide relevant information about the Trust, as well as help prospect for new schools to become part of the Trust.
However, in the development of a great MAT website, it is important to consider all the necessary aspects and balance building upon the strength of your MAT’s brand as a whole while being able to promote the unique aspects of each member school.
First, let’s have a look at some of the benefits of a website for your MAT:
An MAT website helps forge the public perception of your academies.
It will identify each school as a member of the Trust.
It provides relevant and important information about member schools for visitors.
It can help the Trust establish and build upon its brand identity.
A unified website for the MAT maintains a consistent brand identity across all academies, ensuring the browsing experience when visiting links to the schools from the MAT website is more on brand.
A completed MAT website will mean that satellite school websites are easier to be completed, which can reduce the costs for a Trust when multiple websites for each member academy are needed.
A common Content Management System (CMS) makes updating and managing the school’s websites consistent across the board.
In the 21st century, a truly digital age, no business or organisation should be without a website, and an MAT is no different. It is a vital component of the Trust’s PR, marketing, and communications strategy, as well as formalising its online presence and visibility, and builds the foundation of the Trust’s credibility and reputation.
Here’s what you need to consider when you’re ready for your new MAT website.
1. Branding
Developing your brand will help cement a strong, positive perception of your Trust in the eye of the public and combines such elements as logo design, mission statements, and maintaining a consistent theme throughout all your marketing and communications.
Before you start the process of building your website, you must spend some time refining your brand and consider aspects such as clearly defining the ethos of the Trust, the look and feel of the branding across all marketing materials and assets for member academies, and whether you should develop one logo for all members or if consistency can be maintained without needing to redesign school badges and logos.
2. Keep your target audience in mind
An MAT will have multiple stakeholders, each of which will have varying wants and needs. It is important to consider these and cater for them on the MAT’s website, as well as the individual academy websites. Think about your target audience as individuals, and then develop each touchpoint to engage with those individuals.
If you want your MAT website to focus on recruitment and reputation, for example, it would be advantageous to ensure that content on the homepage of your website is updated regularly with new appointments to high profile roles or recent positive media coverage.
Your social media channels, in particular Twitter, should go hand in hand with your website. Social media is excellent at engaging with existing, new, and prospective stakeholders, and can be more informal and conversational than the copy on your website. Integrating your Twitter feed into your news/blogs will ensure that new posts on social media are updated on your site.
Websites for member academies can focus more on the values of individual schools, academic opportunities and activities, and what they can offer to families, instead of any focus on the MAT brand or the Trust.
3. Ensure policies are easily available and easily readable
It is far from the most exciting aspect of your MAT website but ensuring that you have statutory and policy documents readily available and easy to read and absorb is vital to the success of the MAT’s brand.
Not only should policies be formatted in a way that makes them easy to ready, but it is very important that they can be easily accessed and read on a range of devices, whether it's a high-end desktop PC or a battered smartphone.
If your website is not optimised for mobile and desktop, visitors will inevitably be frustrated and go and look elsewhere, which will also reflect poorly on your brand.
4. Have clear links to member schools
While you will want to have all the information about the Trust on the website, it is also important that visitors are easily able to find links to individual member schools.
Depending on how many member academies and their level of independence, this could be as simple as listing the member schools via a drop-down menu or developing a standalone page on the MAT website with a visual guide to all members. An interactive page, for example, a map, can engage visitors and help them find the relevant links quickly.
5. Form over function
You will want your MAT website to be useful and contain all the relevant information, but it also needs to be engaging, interesting, and provide a good user experience for visitors. Ensure that information is easy to find with a clear and simple navigation system, and consider adding links to commonly requested information to the homepage, for example, term times and newsletters.
To ensure that you have a website for your MAT that is engaging, professional, and reflects a well-managed and successful organisation, then you should seek out an organisation that not only knows website design inside and out, but also the workings of a Multi-Academy Trust, and what it needs to be successful.
At Glove Consulting, we can offer advice on what to include on your website, as well as designing, building and hosting the site. If you’re looking for a MAT website for educational professionals that fits like a glove, come and talk to us today!