RNN Group

Overview

RNN Group is one of the biggest further and higher education providers in South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire — Rotherham College, North Notts College, Dearne Valley College and University Centre Rotherham, plus the group’s commercial training arm. Tens of thousands of students, four distinct brands, one ageing pile of websites holding the whole thing back.

We’ve rebuilt the lot. Not as a one-off project, but as an ongoing partnership: the group site, every college and HE brand, and the commercial services site alongside them. Today that estate pulls over 365,000 visitors a year, and the college sites are all growing — Dearne Valley up 21.6% year-on-year, North Notts up 15%, Rotherham College up 13.5%.

The challenge

For a college, the website is the prospectus, the open day and the application form. It’s where a 16-year-old decides whether to apply, usually on their phone, usually at 11pm.

RNN’s old sites weren’t built for that. They didn’t work properly on mobile — and two-thirds of their visitors are on a phone (66% at Rotherham College). They were slow. They looked dated next to competing colleges. And critically, they weren’t doing the one job that matters: turning interest into enquiries and enrolments. Four brands meant four inconsistent sites that were painful to update, so the marketing team couldn’t move quickly when it mattered — at clearing, at enrolment, during a campaign.

When the front door to a college looks tired and won’t load on a phone, you don’t hear about it. The student just applies somewhere else.

What we did

We treated it as one estate, not a stack of separate websites.

A proper rebuild, brand by brand

We redesigned and rebuilt all five of their main websites — Rotherham College, North Notts College, Dearne Valley College, University Centre Rotherham and the RNN Group site itself — mobile-first, fast, and built around how people actually choose a course. Each college kept its own identity; underneath, they share a consistent, maintainable foundation so the group isn’t paying to solve the same problem four times.

Built for the people who run it

The sites are built for a marketing team, not a developer. Course pages, term dates, open days, campaign landing pages and apply journeys are all theirs to run. When clearing hits or a campaign goes live, they can move on the same day instead of raising a ticket and waiting.

Built to be measured

We instrumented everything properly — every site has rich, structured analytics (course types, term dates, application steps), so RNN can see exactly what’s working and we can keep improving it. That’s the consultancy half of the relationship: not just shipping sites, but helping them understand and act on the numbers.

Results

The estate now does its job.

• 365,000+ visitors a year across the group’s sites.
• Every college growing year-on-year — Dearne Valley +21.6%, North Notts +15.0%, Rotherham College +13.5%, University Centre Rotherham +6.2%.
• Social referrals up several hundred per cent — North Notts’ social traffic grew almost 400%, Dearne Valley’s 212% — because the sites finally look good when they’re shared and opened on a phone.
• Paid campaigns scaling hard — paid search up 410% at Rotherham College, 303% at Dearne Valley — the marketing team can now point ad spend at pages that actually convert.
• And it converts. At Rotherham College alone the site drove 10,000 “apply now” actions in the last year, with email enquiries up 401%.

The headline isn’t one number — it’s that a whole digital estate went from holding the group back to driving growth across four brands at once.