Missed Opportunities: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

There’s nothing worse than realising you missed out on a great opportunity. Whether it’s tickets to see your favourite band, a local event, or a unique show, the feeling of regret and disappointment can be quite profound. We often find ourselves lamenting how we could have seized an opportunity and reaped its benefits, only to watch it pass us by.

So why do we miss out on opportunities? More often than not, it’s because we’re unaware of them. If you don’t know about an opportunity, you can’t act on it.

In a previous role, I spent a lot of time planning and preparing staff wellbeing activities. We hosted everything from arts and crafts sessions and financial wellbeing workshops to fitness classes. Our aim was to prioritise staff wellbeing and provide opportunities for self-care during the workday, especially for those in contact roles. Despite our best efforts, we struggled to engage these employees, often only attracting a few non-contact staff to yoga, candle making, macrame, or onsite counselling sessions to name a few. While it was great to have some participation, it was disheartening to rarely reach those who could benefit the most. Self-care and personal development are crucial, yet they often get overlooked.

So why did we have such difficulty engaging these staff members? More often than not, the response was, "I didn't know you were running a ‘Couch to 5K Club’," or "Can I sign up for the ‘reflexology’ session?" only to find out it had occurred two weeks earlier. This usually happened because we relied on traditional print and poster distribution across the site and depended on senior staff to share these communications with their teams. As you might guess, this often didn’t happen, and we faced the additional challenge of arranging staff coverage. No easy feat.?

Thinking about these missed opportunities, a similar experience was felt by Transform Trust. In much the same way that I experienced, staff at Transform Trust were faced with the same problem of communication not reaching the staff they needed it to reach. Putting on staff events, sharing information from the trust and their CPD offering were some of the key messages not getting through and being disseminated to teacher level. So to address this problem the trust took action to install a digital signage screen in all staff rooms across the trust to share these messages centrally from the trust. Having a screen exclusively for staff communications and being able to tailor their messaging and use engaging content created on Canva, they were able to effectively advertise end-of-term events, INSET days, and QR codes for bulletins. One of the crucial pieces of information they struggled to communicate was about CPD (Continuing Professional Development) courses, which are essential for staff development and benefit the entire organisation.

Transform Trust’s solution highlights the importance of effective communication and the impact it can have on staff engagement and participation. By leveraging digital tools and creating visually appealing content, they were able to bridge the communication gap and ensure that important opportunities were not missed. This approach serves as a valuable lesson in how we can better inform and engage those who stand to gain the most from these opportunities.

If you’d like to find out more examples of how schools innovatively use digital signage to promote engagement and attendance of events and their offering you can see our latest case studies here.?