Cooperation and service at Tilburg University With a total of 13,500 students, more than 1,000 employees and a comprehensive university campus, good internal communications at Tilburg University are indeed very essential. That’s why, some years ago, the Tilburg University acquired narrowcasting from LeftClick.

Rini Steenhorst, functional manager of (inter alia) the narrowcasting solutions at Tilburg University: “In total there are 23 screens installed at our university. These are mainly used for internal information such as time-table information and opening times of our buildings. But there is also external information displayed, such as the train times, or in case of major events, the tweets of visitors and participants. There is also tickertape with, for example, appeals and announcements of students.”

The idea of narrowcasting came to existence around five years ago, when Tilburg University was looking for a new way of informing students in a more focused way. The information that is given via the system changes regularly and should be constantly undated. Rini Steenhorst: “If we would communicate this information to the students via email every day, these emails would soon be seen as spam I suppose. That’s why we were looking for some other way.”

Narrowcasting came up with a solution: a way of offering focused information at the right place and to a specific target group. Rini Steenhorst: “In every building its own time-table information is displayed, in which it can be seen in which halls the lectures are given in that building. In this case, the information is displayed directly from the webpage onto the screen. And always, when a certain change is made on that page, it can be seen right away via narrowcasting. That’s quite nice, because that way the information is always current.”

On these screens you can also see the current train timings, which the visitors of the premises can see when they are leaving. That way, students, employees and visitors are kept updated with the most current information. Rini Steenhorst: “We make use of narrowcasting also in the library and in cyber cafes, but also at other places where many students gather and meet each other.

But there are even more applications of the system, for example, at the education office of the faculty of Economy. Rini Steenhorst: “Students can ask all sorts of questions at the education office, and for that they have to make an appointment via a pillar at the entrance. Due to a link with narrowcasting, it is given in real-time on the screen how many there are waiting before the student, and how long it can take before it’s his or her turn.”

Congresses, meetings and events that take place in the hall of the university, can also be streamed live to the narrowcasting system, and if desired, spread across the whole campus. Rini Steenhorst: “Basically, it is every faculty’s own communication department that takes care of the content on the screen. That’s how there are six different teams of people who can change the content of the system. But sometimes there are things that we would like to share across the whole university, such as congress or an important internal communication. That too is possible. In such a case I adapt the rights of some users, or I make sure that the information is spread more broadly by other means. The templates of the screens are always the same however: for that we apply the corporate identity of the Tilburg University.