TrilbyTV at Brentwood School creating maximum impact!

At TrilbyTV we love road trips, especially when we’re heading to one of the UK’s leading independent schools! So on a pretty miserable winter’s day, we made our way over to Essex to visit Brentwood School.

Upon arrival it was pretty easy to see the impact that digital signage is having. In the centre of their ambient, modern reception was a HUGE multi-screen video wall! For visitors, parents and prospective parents, this is the perfect way to make a statement with their vision video and Twitter feed showing exactly what goes on at Brentwood and communicating their brand identity as a school.

We were met by IT Manager, Sarb Singh, who after grabbing us a well needed coffee, showed us around. Brentwood has a great mix of old and new. It has a chapel and its first ever classroom is 463 years old, where you can still see carvings of old students’ names taken from 100 year old desktops!

Touring the school, it was easy to see how important digital signage is for Brentwood. The sports department was showing videos of student’s activities in the gym, sports hall and out on the field. The sixth form centre had the UCAS Twitter feed showing on the screen. This is definitely a really good way to keep this demographic up to date with university based information. The physics department was showcasing interesting videos of work in the labs. The design department also had a screen reinforcing students’ design projects which looked fantastic. In the staff room there was a screen keeping staff informed and engaged while taking their breaks.

Chatting to Sarb & Nichola about Digital Signage

After the fantastic tour we sat down with Sarb and were also joined by Communications Officer, Nichola Bearman. They told us how digital signage is working for them and how they manage it effectively.

Nichola: “We used TrilbyTV on the fly to begin with. We soon realised that we needed to be more productive and needed to know exactly what was going up and where. In the comms team, there were so many of us that we didn’t know who was doing what and when. So I created a social media calendar which is on Google. It’s got the dates of every event and anything we want to target, coming up. Next to that are our initials, so we can see who’s doing what, when and plan in advance. So now we’ve got TrilbyTV and digital signage all planned out alongside other communication tools like social media in one place.”

“It’s a great way of organising things, you can go onto the calendar and say, ‘Right I’m doing that one’. You can say if it’s posted, scheduled or live. So that’s how we control it now in comms and we’re finding that having a proper plan really works.”

“…with TrilbyTV we can focus in on a particular area and customise the content for those screens.”

“We have events aimed at feeder schools, advanced master classes, so we decide what we want to put up on the screen, we can design that on publisher and can then make that an mp4. We also just did video training in Adobe Premiere Pro so we can then make videos from that, pop it up on the screen and can put it up in reception. It’s great because we know where it is, we also find with TrilbyTV we can focus in on a particular area and customise the content for those screens.”

“With events that parents attend, we publish it on eventbrite, we then create a slide for that and pop it around the school’s screens. We’re selling a lot more tickets now that they know what’s going on in the evening.”

“I love the flexibility of TrilbyTV…”

Sarb: “I think that the four screen video wall in reception has the impact that it was supposed to have. It’s a pure marketing screen aimed at parents, prospective parents and pupils because that’s where they’re coming to. That’s why we put events up, videos, that kind of stuff. It’s a few snippets but it quickly and beautifully gives a picture of the whole school and the ethos of the school.”

“I love the flexibility of TrilbyTV, the price point is good with the unlimited screen licence, it’s helped us to achieve maximum deployment. It’s no hassle at all, every digital signage solution that we’ve looked at in the past was a big expense which you don’t have with TrilbyTV. We’ve even got screens running in the boarding houses communicating to the boarders promoting mental health, wellness, community and obviously just the general day to day messages, so it’s very flexible. If we want an open day message across the site, we just put in on all of the TVs as a centralised announcement.”

Nichola: “We can dictate when content goes up on the screen and when it deletes from the screen. When we had our scholarship day, we had a welcome slide on the screen for just the day. The slide then deleted automatically at the end of the day. It’s a great tool!”

“You just put TrilbyTV Player on a Firestick or Android Box, plug it in and it just works…”

Sarb:“You just put TrilbyTV Player on a Firestick or Android Box, plug it in and it just works because it’s all in the cloud. The ability for any member of staff to log in, upload, approve and then publish it to the screens is really easy.”

Sarb: “We’re up to 18 screens and our next deployment is putting something in music. Our music department is all over Twitter everyday because there’s lots to promote, with events and stuff going on. For them it’ll be a good thing to showcase to the pupils going into the building what they do. It will also be good to show the ones that are actually doing music, what events are coming up.”

Sarb: “My tip to anyone joining Trilby is just think outside of the box, it’s so flexible that you can do anything with it. Don’t overcomplicate what you’re doing, just look at maximum impact and get the pupils to buy-in and get them uploading stuff as well.”

Nichola: “I’d recommend scheduling on TrilbyTV, if there’s more than one of you then plan ahead.”

Brentwood Delivering Maximum Impact

We had a cracking time at Brentwood, seeing how they are utilising TrilbyTV. It’s great to see how they have made it such a productive marketing tool, delivering maximum impact across their school. If you’d like to switch on your school’s signage you can give us a go with a free 30-day trial!