New Toys For The Lobby

The college has these new flatscreen televisions on rolling mounts deployed around campus as an experiment in mobile information stations. Fortunately for me, the woman who coordinated the purchasing effort decided there would be a need for a roving screen. (The others, while mobile generally don’t move much because they are networked for ease of updating.) The benefit to me is that I can borrow the television for our events.

We had an event this past weekend so I used the opportunity to create a looping presentation with information about the band for a number of slides. Then I had information about upcoming performances, workshops and master classes. I am hoping between the television in the lobby, the brochures, notes in the program book and posters in the restrooms, we will increase people’s awareness about our events. The other screens around campus have information about our shows on them, but that is laid out by someone in a central office. The screen in my lobby has our information exclusively and if I learn of something interesting during a performance, I can update the information and have it running at intermission.

In addition to our information, I also made up a little promotional ad for Americans for the Arts, “Arts, Ask for More” campaign using the print ads you can download via the social media widget they created. (You can see the widget in the lower right hand corner of my home page. My entry on the widget is here. The text on the bottom of the ads were a little hard to read so I rewrote the text beneath the image and used their phrase “For 10 Simple Ways You Can Get More Arts Into Your Child’s Life,” followed by the Americans for the Arts web address.

I felt it was important to add this information both on the general principle of promoting arts education, but because this Friday is the first day of statewide furloughs which will take teachers, and therefore children, out of the classrooms. I wanted to provide people with a source of ideas for providing an educational experience for their kids.

So now I am contemplating how to most fully use the screen. I know there are many performance venues who use flat screens to promote their events. If anyone has some suggestions for what sort of information we can include or how to use the tool more advantageously than just a substitute for multiple posters, let me know. I have already started including trivia information about the groups to help audiences understand them a little better. I would love to include video except that YouTube videos look awful at such high resolution. I would need to rely on DVDs which artists are moving away from in favor of online video.