A digital bulletin board, or digital notice board, is a screen that does the job of the cork board. Notices are written in a browser, reach the screen within seconds and come off it when someone switches them off. You need three things: a display, a small player behind it (an Android TV box, or a browser on a computer) and software that lets more than one person post. With SignageStack the software costs €11 per screen per month, or €100 a year, and the display and the box may be things you already own.
The hardware is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what goes on the screen, who is allowed to post, and who takes old notices down. This guide covers all three for an office, a school and a residential building.
What a screen does better than paper, and what it does worse
What it does better:
- It can be read. A notice in large type on a lit screen reads from across a corridor. An A4 sheet in 11-point text does not.
- You change it from your desk. A wrong date is corrected in seconds, without anyone walking to the second floor with a box of drawing pins.
- One notice, several places. The same notice can run by the lift, in the staff room and at reception, and it changes everywhere at once.
- It shows things paper cannot: a calendar that updates itself, a table from a spreadsheet, a countdown to the event, a QR code that opens the sign-up form.
- Urgent messages come first. An evacuation or a closure can cover every screen at once instead of waiting for someone to notice a new sheet.
What it does worse:
- It shows one thing at a time. A cork board shows everything at once; a screen rotates. Someone who glances at it for five seconds sees one notice, not twelve. This one constraint shapes almost everything below.
- Nobody can tear off a phone number. A QR code does that job, but only for people with a phone in their hand.
- It needs power and, to receive changes, a network.
- It needs an owner. A cork board covered in stale notices looks neglected. A screen showing stale notices looks broken.
What to post on a digital bulletin board
Good notices are short, have an end date and concern everyone who walks past. Long documents and anything personal belong somewhere else.
In an office
- A welcome for visitors at reception, and today's meeting-room bookings
- The canteen menu for the week, IT maintenance windows, the date of the fire drill
- New starters and team news, with a photo only if the person agrees
- A few figures the whole team works towards; our guide to an office TV dashboard shows how to put them on screen
Staff who never sit at a desk, in a warehouse or a shop's back room, have their own guide: internal communication screens.
In a school
- Timetable changes and room swaps for the day
- Events with a countdown: sports day, the concert, the last day of term
- Club and trip sign-ups through a QR code
- Student work and photos, under the same consent rules the school applies to its website
- Closure and emergency notices
More in digital signage for schools.
In a residential building
- House rules, bin collection days and the cleaning rota for shared areas
- Planned works: water off on Tuesday from 9 to 12, lift maintenance, meter readings
- Who to call out of hours: the caretaker, the emergency plumber, the managing agent
- A QR code that opens the repair request form or starts an email to the managing agent
A hallway is a different place from an office. There is often no socket and no internet there, so check both before buying a screen: the player keeps playing without a network, but it needs one to receive new notices. And think about who walks past. Residents' names, complaints about a particular flat and anything that says who is away do not belong on a screen every courier can read.
What to leave on paper
Anything someone has to read in full or come back to: contracts, the complete house rules, minutes. The same goes for anything you are legally required to display, unless you have confirmed that a screen meets the requirement. A screen that shows each notice for a few seconds in turn is not built for things people must be able to consult at any time.
How to make the notices
Each notice is an item in a playlist with its own duration, and the playlist loops. There are a few ways to make one:
- A short text notice. The Text app takes a message, lets you set the font, size and colours, and draws it on the screen itself, so it plays without the internet. Keep it to a headline and two lines.
- A designed notice. Anything made in a design tool and exported as an image or a video is uploaded and added to the playlist the same way.
- An existing document. The PDF Reader app shows a PDF full-screen and turns the pages on its own. Good for a one-page notice that already exists as a file.
- Dates. The Google Calendar app shows a calendar you already keep and follows it when events are added or moved. It only reads; nobody can change the calendar from the screen.
- One-liners. The Ticker app runs a band of short messages along the top or bottom of the screen, over whatever else is playing: "Car park closed on Friday", "Parents' evening Thursday at 18:00".
- A way to find out more. A QR code with a caption ("Sign up here") opens a web page, starts an email or dials a number.
Keep the loop short
Because the screen rotates, the length of the loop decides how much anyone sees. Ten notices at eight seconds each make an 80-second loop, and someone who waits 30 seconds for the lift sees fewer than half of them. Three ways around it:
- Post less. If everything is on the board, nothing is.
- Give permanent things a permanent place. The Zones app splits the screen into panels, so the calendar or the bin days can stay on one side while the notices rotate on the other.
- Move one-liners into the ticker band, where they do not take a slot in the rotation.
A common rule of thumb for the duration: long enough that someone who arrives halfway through a notice can still read it once from the start.
Who can post: roles instead of a shared password
On a cork board anyone with a pin can post. On a screen you decide. In SignageStack you invite people by email, each with their own login and one of three roles:
- Admin: invites and manages people, changes the organisation's settings and all content.
- Member: works with screens, playlists and media, but cannot manage people or settings.
- Viewer: sees screens, playlists and media and cannot change anything. Useful for a head teacher or a building's owners who want to see what is on.
Two things to know before you hand out logins. Roles apply to the whole organisation, so a Member can change every screen in it, not only the one in their corridor. And there is no approval step: what a Member publishes goes on the screen. If every notice should be checked first, that is an agreement between people, not a setting. The arrangement that works is the one most paper notice boards already had: a few people who post, and one person who owns the board. In a residential building that person is usually the managing agent, and residents send their notices there rather than getting a login.
How old notices come down
On paper, a notice comes down when somebody bothers. On a screen it is easier, but it is still a job: SignageStack does not take an individual notice down on a set date by itself. What works:
- Put the end date in the notice ("until 14 March") and in its name in the dashboard, so expired items stand out in the list.
- Give one person a fixed slot each week to clear out what has expired.
- Switch items off instead of deleting them. A disabled item leaves the screens within seconds but stays in the playlist, marked as disabled, ready for next year's sports day.
- Edit rather than replace. Correct the date in the Text app once and every playlist that uses it shows the new date.
Separately, every screen has working hours: set times for each day of the week, or a range of dates. Outside them the screen goes into standby and shows black, and it plays again at the next start time. That takes care of evenings, weekends and the empty office at night. The display itself stays powered; if you want it switched off to save electricity, use its own timer if it has one.
For the one situation where nobody can wait, prepare a message in advance with the Emergency Alert app and leave it switched off. When you switch it on, it covers every screen you chose within a second, including screens outside their working hours, and it stays up if the network drops.
One screen or many?
Start with one, in the place where people already stop: by the lift, at the entrance, in the staff room or at the canteen queue. Choose the size from the distance. A rule of thumb is that the furthest reader should be no more than four screen heights away for anything read line by line; how to choose a screen size goes through it.
When you add screens, the dashboard lets you add a playlist to several screens in one go, and a change to that playlist reaches all of them. A screen's content can also hold items of its own next to a shared playlist, so the second building or the sixth-form corridor gets the common notices plus its own. The ticker can differ by screen as well: add the Ticker app once for each set of messages and choose its screens.
The dashboard shows each screen's live status and when it last checked in, so a dark screen in the east wing shows up before anyone mentions it.
What hardware do you need?
A display with an HDMI input, and something to run the player:
- An Android TV box or stick with Android 8 or newer and 2 GB of RAM or more. The player starts at boot, a supervisor restarts it if it stops, and with a box that powers on by itself after a power cut the board comes back without anyone touching it. A box that does the job typically costs somewhere between €40 and €120; choosing an Android TV box lists what to check.
- A TV that runs Android TV or Google TV and can install the player itself.
- A computer with a browser: current Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox, full-screen. Fine where a PC already sits next to the screen.
Samsung (Tizen) and LG (webOS) smart TVs have no SignageStack app. Their built-in browser can open the web player, but it will not restart it after a power cut or keep it full-screen, so for a board nobody checks every day, add a small Android box. Fire TV sticks and the Raspberry Pi are not qualified players. The hardware page covers what is worth paying for.
What does a digital bulletin board cost?
For one screen:
- The display. The TV you already have, or a new one. For a board that runs all day, consider a commercial panel rated for 12 to 24 hours; a consumer TV is built for a few hours a day.
- The player. Typically €40 to €120 for an Android box, or nothing if a computer is already there.
- Mounting and power. A wall bracket, a socket within reach of the cable and, in a hallway, possibly an electrician. This is the line people forget.
- The software. With SignageStack, €11 per screen per month or €100 per screen per year, excluding VAT. One plan with every feature, no setup fee and no charge per person who posts. The pricing page has the details.
There are free ways to run a screen, from a slideshow on a USB stick to self-hosted open-source software. Each one costs time instead of money, and our guide to free digital signage software goes through them honestly.
Where to start
Take the paper board as it looks today and sort it into three piles: what has expired (throw it away), what has to stay on paper, and what is short and has an end date. The third pile is your first playlist. Choose one screen where people wait, name the person who owns it, and set its working hours.
The SignageStack trial runs for 21 days with every feature, on one screen, and needs no card. Pair a TV, type in this week's notices, and after a week ask a few people what they read on it.
