Maristes Catalunya: one foundation, ten schools and over ten years of digital ecosystem

Maristes Catalunya, through the Fundació Champagnat, runs the ten Marist schools in Catalonia: Champagnat in Badalona, Sants-Les Corts, Girona, La Immaculada, Igualada, Rubí, Montserrat in Lleida, Valldemia in Mataró, Anna Ravell and Sant Pere Chanel in Malgrat de Mar. Around it there's a network of social work centres, holiday houses such as Mogent, in Llinars del Vallès, and the Monestir de les Avellanes, in Os de Balaguer, which offers guest accommodation, a restaurant, a spirituality house and event spaces. An institution with many faces that needed to speak with a single voice.

The starting point was the same as for almost every school at the time. Classrooms filled themselves and digital presence wasn't a priority: the schools' websites were basic, often built in-house and with no commercial purpose. But families were already choosing a school online too, looking on the website for each centre's facilities, educational project, values and services.

The challenge was twofold. Each school needed to tell what makes it unique and manage its own content, and the Fundació needed the whole network to convey the same brand and the same project. All without multiplying costs, and alongside two very different pieces: holiday houses that live off bookings from schools and families, and a monastery that runs like a small hotel.

We started with digital strategy: we profiled the institution's audiences from real data, defined the social media channels for the Fundació and for each school, and built a content plan with eight content types, geared towards strengthening the brand, increasing enrolment and building relationships with families. We supported the team in carrying it out for years.

Then we conceptualised, designed and developed the web ecosystem on Drupal with the Domain architecture: a single installation in which each school has its own domain and manages its own users and content, while the Fundació manages all the sites transversally and decides what's featured on each one. A senior copywriter reviewed the content for every school and the ecosystem was published in 2017. Alongside this we created the microsite for the Xarxa d'Innovació (Innovation Network), the participatory process in which the schools' educational community submitted 1,219 pedagogical innovation proposals.

The houses got their own websites. In 2018 we published the one for the Mogent holiday house. And the Monestir de les Avellanes was a challenge unlike anything before: we went to get to know the place, its facilities, its services, its products and its team, and gave it a renewed brand and a website in four languages, far more appealing and dynamic than you'd expect from a monastery, with the guest accommodation, the restaurant, the spaces for weddings and events, the shop and wines of the monastery, gift vouchers and online bookings.