WI School District Uses Digital Signage To Communicate Quickly From K To 12

May 17, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Hat tip to a small school and school district in rural Wisconsin for doing a nice job with its in-school digital signage network, on a modest budget and with finite time.

The district uses Rise Vision’s CMS – very popular in the education market – and has screens up to communicate with students all the way from K to 12 under one roof.

A Rise Vision case study says Weston School District went to network screens to solve a big communications problem:

Four years ago, communication at Weston relied on printed formats. Physical newsletters were mailed to families to keep them updated about the school. On the school site, bulletin boards were used to communicate with students. These approaches had obvious shortcomings. Traditional communication tools like these were slow to respond to changes, cumbersome, and time-consuming to produce. They also suffered from the notorious ‘ad blindness’ effect that makes us disregard signs we see every day. ‘Messaging did not reach all those we wished to target,’ (social media/PR director Amanda) Keller explains, and ‘messages were often outdated before they reached our target audience.’

‘It was frustrating to put so much time into communication we knew would be outdated before it reached our families and community,’ Keller continues. ‘It was also time-consuming to create bulletin boards that were very limited in how we could use them. These bulletin boards also had to be recreated often to keep the images current.’

Now, Weston has multiple digital communication channels: there’s a school website, social media channels, and a school app.

Rather than paper, weekly digital newsletters are emailed to parents. Event promotional materials are created for upcoming events and in-school, day-to-day communication is handled on digital signage.

I like this because I have seen lots and lots of school signage networks that went to town with the software’s capabilities – breaking up the screen in content zones and adding things like tickers. The examples in the case study are well-designed, clean and quickly digestible.

Keller uses Rise’s template library, but also produces visuals in the graphic design platform Canva.

I am very confused by the concept of donkey basketball (see below)

 

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