Nottingham College unifies digital communication across nine campuses

Connecting 30,000 students and staff with Uniguest Campus Hub.

Nottingham College is one of the UK’s largest further-education colleges, supporting more than 30,000 students and staff across nine campuses across the city. With learners and employees spread across multiple sites, clear and timely communication is essential – and digital signage plays a central role in how the College keeps its community informed.

For Nottingham College, the challenge was not just scale, but consistency. Screens existed across the estate, but they were difficult to manage, time-consuming to update and increasingly disconnected from the College’s wider digital strategy.

With nine campuses across the city, we needed a single, managed solution, We simply don’t have the capacity to treat every screen as a standalone device – content has to be updated, scheduled and controlled centrally rather than relying on people visiting buildings to make changes

James White

Senior Web Developer and Digital Officer

To address this, Nottingham College selected Uniguest’s Campus Hub as the foundation for a new, centrally managed signage network that could be rolled out across every campus and evolve with the College’s needs.

From fragmented screens to a managed network

The project was driven by IT Services, with a clear brief: deploy a platform that could be controlled remotely, standardised across all sites and integrated into the College’s wider digital environment.

What we wanted was something which is robust and standardised, which we can roll out across all our campuses and control from the back end.

Yasir Rafi

Head of IT Services

Campus Hub delivered that structure, giving IT full visibility and control of the signage estate while enabling Marketing and Digital teams to take ownership of content, layouts and workflows. Managing the network from a single platform has transformed day-to-day operations, making updates immediate and reliable.
Alongside its signage network, Nottingham College now operates more than 60 digital portals across its campuses, all delivered through the same managed Campus Hub environment. This growing ecosystem allows the College to deliver targeted information and services to different audiences, while maintaining central governance and security.

Dynamic, data-driven content

Once the core platform was in place, Nottingham College began to move far beyond static signage. Using Campus Hub’s CMS and layout engine, the Digital & Web Services team created zoned screens that combine multiple content streams in a single display.
Live data now sits at the heart of the network. Screens integrate real-time feeds from internal systems such as SharePoint and student portals, alongside a wide range of Nottingham open data and APIs delivering live news, events, travel information and more. This allows the College to surface up-to-date information on student activities, campus news, transport status and what’s happening across the city – all without manual intervention.

The result is a living communications channel that reflects both campus life and the wider community.

The Campus Hub CMS is a very capable system, You can have dynamic content, split-screen content and zone different layouts so you don’t have to take up a whole screen.

James White

Senior Web Developer and Digital Officer

A growing part of the College’s communications strategy

As the platform has matured, Campus Hub has become embedded in Nottingham College’s wider communications approach. Demand for screen space continues to grow as departments recognise the value of visible, real-time messaging in shared spaces.

The fact that we get a lot of requests would suggest that people are taking notice, It’s a channel that has become more and more part of our communication strategy.

James White

Senior Web Developer and Digital Officer

More broadly, Uniguest Campus Hub has created a shared digital communications layer across Nottingham College. With nine campuses spread across the city, staff and students are no longer limited to what’s happening in their own building – they’re connected to what’s happening across the wider organisation.

It has really joined the community together, We’re a very large college, and having shared communication across every campus means people feel connected to what’s happening across the organisation rather than just in their own building.

Yasir Rafi

Head of IT Services

A platform aligned with long-term digital strategy

Uniguest was chosen not only for the strength of its technology, but for how closely it aligned with Nottingham College’s digital-first ambitions. Campus Hub has given the College a scalable foundation that supports both today’s communications needs and future innovation.

Uniguest aligned with our strategy of harnessing digital technology in everything we do. When we looked at their roadmap, we wanted to be part of that journey as well.

Yasir Rafi

Head of IT Services

Looking ahead

Today, Nottingham College operates a unified, centrally managed digital-signage network that reaches every campus and serves a community of more than 30,000 people. Campus Hub delivers a constantly evolving mix of College announcements, student activity, staff updates and city-wide information – all powered by live data and controlled from a single platform.

What began as a requirement for a reliable signage system has become a core digital communications platform, supporting Nottingham College’s mission to be digital-first, inclusive and connected across all nine campuses.