A screen in the entrance: digital signage for places of worship

Places of worship are among the best uses for a screen and among the worst served by the products sold for it. The requirement is modest, the budget is usually nil, and the person maintaining it has other things to do on a Saturday.

What the screen is for

Three things, in this order:

Times. Service or prayer times, large, legible from the door, ideally with a countdown to the next one. This is the reason most people glance at the screen at all.

This week. Notices, meetings, the thing that has moved. Changed once a week in five minutes or it will not be changed at all.

Welcome. A quiet gallery and a greeting, in the languages of the congregation. This is what the screen does for the other six days.

The constraint that decides everything

Whoever maintains it is a volunteer. That single fact rules out:

• Anything that needs a laptop and a login remembered from last month.
• Anything with a monthly bill somebody has to justify to a committee.
• Anything that breaks in a way requiring the person who set it up.

It argues for: a board that is edited from a phone, a device that recovers from a power cut on its own, and software with no account and no renewal date.

Multilingual boards

Many congregations need more than one script, and this is where cheap setups usually go wrong.

• Upload a proper typeface for the script. For Arabic and Persian, Vazirmatn is openly licensed and covers both well.
• Do not rely on system font substitution. The substitute will not match your weight, and the board will look like two designs stapled together.
• Decide once whether numerals are Eastern Arabic or Western, and apply it to the whole board. Mixed numeral systems read as a mistake even to people who cannot say why.
• Have somebody who reads the script check the real board on the real screen. Reversed punctuation and wrong-form digits are invisible to a Latin-alphabet reviewer and obvious to a native reader in a second.

Hardware

An Android TV stick behind a television is enough. What matters more:

• Mains power, and a device set to switch on when power returns.
• Mounted out of reach, with the cable routed.
• A screen bright enough for the entrance, which is often sunnier than you remember when you tested it in the evening.

The setup, realistically

An afternoon. Install the app, import a template so the board already looks finished, change the words, mount the screen, test one reboot before you leave. The reboot test is the one people skip and the one that causes the call in February.

Keeping it alive

The screens that fail are the ones nobody owns. Write two names on a card inside the enclosure — the person who edits it and the person who knows the PIN — and put a fifteen-minute slot in the same weekly rhythm as everything else. A screen showing last month's notices does more damage than no screen.

Our worship templates include prayer-time boards, countdowns and bilingual welcome layouts. They are free, as is the app, and there is no account to create.