At my new workplace, we have these huge bulletin boards that are used for displaying all kinds of employee information: birthdays, anniversaries, volunteer opportunities, and more. The boards are located by the breakrooms and restrooms — with the hopes that associates will stop and take a look. However, according to my team, employees haven’t really paid attention to the boards because they’ve not been as eye-catching as they could be. When the “budget” for the boards is $0, there are only so many things you can do with construction paper, staples, and an HP color printer. So they thought…

The challenge: Create an interesting bulletin board for employees without having to spend money and using only available materials — double-sided tape, staples, colored paper, and the color printer.

My solution: Create gigantic, interactive calendars for the boards.

It seemed ambitious, but the concept and production was actually quite easy. It involved a little bit of time and some measurements. And research on Flickr.

My inspiration for the board came from this Photojojo post on how to create a perpetual wall calendar. I wanted to bring in bright colors, funky images, and hopefully make something that we could use over and over again (or at least modify easily for the next time).

But it had to be an interactive calendar — something that would make employees come up to the bulletin board and ACT. So I thought rather than just post the information on the board, we’d hide the info (the birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) within the calendar dates. (This project reminded me of the old days when I was a resident advisor in college and had to decorate my hall’s bulletin boards, and the time I worked at an after-school program with elementary school kids. Fun times, for sure!)

So using the colored paper, images of numbers from Flickr, and Wikipedia (to find daily trivia), we created a calendar about 6 feet across and 4 feet high. The dates were made from letter-sized color paper, folded down to be 7″ high (and 8.5″ wide). The short panel was used for stapling the folded sheets to the board. The info was then printed out and cut to fit within the dates. Voila! 

After we put up the calendars on all the boards, we started noticing employees walking up to it and flipping up the dates to find out who was having a birthday or service anniversary. Or to figure out the trivia for the day. We even received an e-mail in our internal communications mailbox from several excited employees.

I know this probably seems silly to a lot of people, but I was really proud to bring some freshness and color to my new company. And it made me happy to know that others were excited about this simple bulletin board makeover.