Discover the benefits of a trust-wide website project 

Using one website provider can help multi-academy trusts (MATs) to save time and money, as well as maintain a consistent look and feel across all the schools.  

If you’re looking at embarking on a trust-wide website project, this guide will help you to ensure it’s a success. 

Using multiple providers can have its challenges

We have found schools within a trust will often have a wide variety of website designs and providers. This is often their legacy provider that they used before they joined the trust and leaves them reluctant to change. 

Multiple providers can affect the trust in the following ways:

• Lack of consistency
• Different software platforms
• Inconsistent levels of support
• Different contract lengths and terms
• Out of date information
• Inability to share content across sites
• Different costs and pricing structures
• Different supplier contacts
• Multiple invoices

However, as a trust grows, managing multiple providers can be costly and confusing.  

One provider is the way forward 

There is a better, more efficient solution available. Let’s take a look at the key benefits of working work with one provider.  

Single point of contact 

Working with one provider means you will benefit from one single point of contact that you can talk to whenever you need help. With Juniper Websites, you will have a dedicated Trust Customer Success Manager who will provide you with support when you need advice on best practice to get the most out of your investment or require a new website for a newly joined school. 

Consistent designs 

Trusts often prefer to have a common look and feel for all their websites to show their joined-up approach and to build brand familiarity. Some trusts give each school autonomy to create their own individual website design. Either option is fine, but to keep costs down, once a bespoke website design has been created, this can be cloned to the other schools in the trust. Each school will still be able to have the cloned design reflect their individual identity by adding their own logo, brand colours and content. 

One source of information 

When all schools are using the same platform, trusts can make use of content-sharing functionalities to help save time. This enables the trust to control and update content that is common to all the schools, such as policies. It can also populate the trust site with content from the schools such as news items and career vacancies.  

One pricing structure 

We aim to provide trusts with a transparent pricing structure that is unique to the trust. It allows trusts to plan budgets and ensures that, when new schools join the trust, you know what the costs will be.  

One contract 

Having one contract means less administration and a defined payment schedule saving the trust previous time. It also makes it easier to add new schools as the trust grows.  

A common platform 

By using one content management system for all of your websites, your resources can be shared, knowledge can be passed on and, if someone is off, the websites can still be updated. Also, with Single Sign On, users will only need to remember one username and password, which is ideal for administrators who need access to every site in the trust. 

Ready to explore the possibility of a trust-wide website project? 

If you’d like to know more about our services and how we can help your trust, you can use our customer support service here. We’d love to help.