Amity International School Amsterdam (Amity) is a new international school in the Amsterdam region. Since opening its doors just over a year ago, the school has grown to 130 students strong and has plans for structured sustainable growth in the coming years to reach their enrollment target of 600.

Marketing and Communications Officer Judith Meijer joined Amity six months ago, bringing her strong corporate marketing background to this new role. Her commercial experience has assisted the School in its start-up stage and has helped build on their strong foundation. “We found that many prospective parents were finding our homepage through Google. Therefore we wanted our new website to really shine. The website is a critical piece of our growth plans with a focus on four main stakeholders: prospective families, parents, neighbors and the press.”

Website Highlights 

• Site launched in under 3 months

• Staff directory nominated for a Double Diamond Award

• Maximized use of one of Finalsite’s themes 

Amity Amsterdam is part of the global organization, the Amity Education Group, which was established over twenty years ago. With more than 150,000 students worldwide, Amity’s fast expanding network of globally benchmarked institutions has resulted in campuses across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, London, India, Singapore, New York, California, Mauritius, China and Romania with further plans of establishing campuses in other countries. Amity’s focus on path-breaking innovations in science and technology, state of the art infrastructure and record job offers from their universities and global business schools have directly resulted in Amity institutes emerging among the most sought-after education destinations globally.

Amity’s new website showcases these core values of the group while also sharing all that makes them unique.  “We believe the website is an important tenet and a crucial pillar to our success,” Judith continued. “Visually appealing along with up-to-date content, we are focused on showcasing that our curriculum is at the top of its game and delivers good results. We opted for a Finalsite theme which was customized with our branding.  The Amity blue and yellow and the green and bright photography used throughout provides a consistent look and feel. We wanted site visitors to get a true sense of the school from the moment they landed on our website.”

“We wanted to share the unique selling points of our school which include our small caring community, our very green campus and our philosophy that the world is our classroom,” she added. Through photos, slogans, strong colors and intuitive navigation, site visitors can see that students are engaged, are happy and enjoy all that Amity offers.  Through a parent testimonial video, prospective parents also get a great sense of the community that they have at the school.

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“Amity looked at several solutions but chose Finalsite as we believe that Composer, Finalsite’s Content Management System, is very straightforward and easy to use. Unlike other systems where changes can take forever, we make changes and updates to our site in seconds. We were looking for flexibility and found that in Finalsite. We can shut down pages, add new pages, create popups and so much more -- key differences from what we found with other providers.” 

Amity’s goal was to be up and running as soon as possible and so they deployed their site relatively quickly when benchmarked against other school website deployments.  Starting their project in December 2018, they launched their site in March 2019.  Judith explains, “Our project manager was very cooperative and helped us launch our site successfully. The support from Finalsite was key in making this project a success. I was able to quickly make changes with my project manager, who provided me with a lot of insights and advice.”  

Powerful Pages that Drive Results

In looking at websites on a daily basis, the Amity site stands out for its depth and thorough use of various Composer features.  The FAQ pages divides and displays content in an easily digestible format instead of a long scrolling page often seen on sites.

Their Meet Our Team directory is stunning. This fine attention to detail shown in the formatting and photography are exemplary. This is why Amity’s Meet Our Team Directory has been nominated for a Finalsite Double Diamond Award.

They also have created an engaging social media mashup page which further engages families in the more day-to-day activities at the school.

These pages reflect the thoroughness and thoughtfulness, along with hard work and commitment that went into crafting this site.

Key Takeaway

Your school website should reflect all that goes on at your school—and for international schools in particular there should never be a shortage of activity to share. Having launched their site less than three months ago, Amity continues to iterate, with plans to upload more videos, testimonials, rebrand the news area, and roll-out Finalsite Portals -- all possible with Finalsite’s scalable and modular solution.

“We are really proud of all that we have accomplished in a short time. Our school's mission and message come through well in our new website and enable us to share with others all the great things happening today and what is planned for the future.  As our school grows, we are confident that the Finalsite Platform will enable us to grow our communications as well.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As part of Finalsite's marketing team, Debbie has worked with international schools for the past 8 years while living in both Asia and Europe. From conference planning and presentations, to association events, and client success stories, she helps schools understand how they can maximize their web presence while partnering with Finalsite. In her free time she enjoys traveling and attending events at her children's international school in Berlin, Germany.