Interlochen Center for the Arts is a beautiful secondary school located in northwest lower Michigan. Interlochen started in the 1920’s, a time when few schools had music programs. Today, Interlochen has hundreds of students and adult learners on its campus, and the school is now a vibrant arts-focused community.

Deciding if Screenly was right for Interlochen

When Internlochen’s IT Department was exploring digital signage solutions, they had a difficult task on their hands. First, their deployment had to be scalable. Interlochen’s campus serves hundreds of students across 1,200 acres of campus facilities. Second, the solution had to be easy-to-use and intuitive for non-technical users. Understandably, the IT team could not have someone coming to them for every content change request.

Interlochen’s IT department looked at a variety of digital signage solutions, including ones with Raspberry Pi and non-Raspberry Pi based players. They ended up choosing Screenly for a few key reasons.

First, Screenly offered a low barrier to entry, especially when it came to hardware costs. The Raspberry Pi based Screenly Player was significantly more affordable than purchasing several Mac Minis or other media player options.

Second, Interlochen’s IT team was impressed with the usability of Screenly’s content management system (CMS) interface. They were confident that they could hand off digital signage content management tasks to a non-technical marketing team. Additionally, they were confident that they would not have to worry about the marketing team burdening the IT department with tickets for usability issues.

Interlochen’s experience with Screenly’s digital signage for schools

After the IT Department deployed their first sign with Screenly, they found that Screenly was a perfect match for their needs. Interlochen quickly scaled their digital signage deployment, and Interlochen now has over 65 Screenly-powered digital signs across their campus.

Interlochen’s Director of IT, Dave Bondurant, credited Screenly’s easy installation as one of the main factors that allowed Interlochen’s digital signage deployment to grow. With the release of the Screenly Box 0 hardware bundle, he could send a ready-to-go Screenly digital signage player to non-technical users on Interlochen’s marketing team. The non-technical team members could then get the new digital sign up and running without ever having to involve Dave or his IT staff. Screenly has been an enormous time-saver for Dave and his team.

Right now, Interlochen displays images and videos for 95% of its content. However, Interlochen is displaying more and more dynamic content via live web pages. This dynamic content includes school event calendars that are regularly updated and changed.

Screenly’s strong points for school digital signage

In conclusion, Dave found the most significant perks and selling points of Screenly to be:

• The low barrier of entry in terms of both hardware and software costs
• The simplicity of getting content onto the screens
• The ability to delegate content management tasks to non-IT teams

Dave and his team have also enjoyed Screenly’s Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) compatibility. There have been several screen locations where power is hard to come by, and PoE has been incredibly useful for those situations.

Hopefully, this case study has helped show how Screenly can provide digital signage for schools. If you would like to learn more about what Screenly can do for schools, check out our article on digital signage uses in schools.

How to get started with screenly

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