Making Digital Signage Screens Part of Campus Life through Dynamic Content

More and more schools are turning to digital signage as an alternative communication tool to reach out to faculty, staff, students and visitors. Here’s why.

By Alex Wang of Dynasign

While newsletters, bulletin boards, emails and Web sites have traditionally facilitated communications on school campuses, the recent arrival of digital signage has offered a new alternative for delivering both real-time and dynamic messaging.

Compared to TV broadcasting or closed circuit TV narrow-casting, digital signage has its unique capability for target-casting, which allows not only broadcasting rich-media content and messages to all locations but also targeting specific content to individual locations.

This unique “target-casting” capability, combined with dynamic and up-to-date content, can be extremely flexible and effective in a campus environment, where there are multiple buildings, facilities and locations.

Digital signage offers several advantages over other forms of on-campus communication vehicles:

• It can reach out to faculty, staff, students and visitors with dynamic rich-media content, while newsletters and bulletin boards can only deliver static information.
• Digital signage messages can catch your attention while you are out and about, while information on a school Web site and emails can only be seen when you log onto your computer or use your smart phone.
• It can broadcast real-time announcements and messages in case of emergencies or special events.
• Digital signage content can be automated and integrated with other data sources or information systems on campus.

Network Operation Models
As digital signage makes its way onto campuses, two different operation models have evolved:

1. Top-Down Approach: Digital signage locations are determined strategically throughout the entire campus. After screens are deployed phase by phase, the marketing and communications department centrally manages the entire network.
2. Bottom-Up Approach: An individual academic department or school starts out to deploy their own digital signage network locally.

Each approach has its own pros and cons. At the end of the day, an on-campus digital signage network should be managed and controlled centrally for broadcasting campus-wide announcements and messages. At the same time, however, each department or location should be able to publish content tailored to its own needs.

Other characteristics of digital signage that offer unique opportunities as a result of its deployment on an educational campus include:

Content Publishing and Automation. While announcements and messages need to be published manually to target one or many locations on the campus network, other types of content can be integrated to feed your digital signage screens automatically with minimal manual intervention. These include:

• News and weather feeds
• Local traffic feeds
• Campus events from event scheduling system (e.g., CollegeNET Inc.’s Resource 25)
• Webcam and video streaming
• Web2.0 applications such as Flickr, Twitter, etc.
• Interactive and real-time poll and survey systems.

Content automation can provide dynamic and up-to-date content to digital signage screens, reduce manual programming needs and minimize human errors.

Mobile Phone and Desktop Screen Integration. In addition to delivering messages to large screens deployed solely for digital signage applications, special applications can be developed for mobile phones and desktop screens to receive up-to-date information on campus. A digital signage publishing system can expand its functionality and coverage from large screens to small screens on your desktops and mobile screens in your hands.

Integrated Emergency Messaging. One of the major applications for digital signage on campus is to deliver emergency broadcasts. With digital signage screens deployed in high traffic locations, emergency messages can be effectively delivered to these key areas. Instead of treating digital signage as a standalone system, a better approach is to integrate the digital signage content publishing system with other facets of the campus emergency broadcasting system, including Web site, mobile phone and desktop computers. In case of an emergency, an alert message can be published from a central location to all screens.

Future Trends
Today, more and more schools are turning to digital signage as an alternative communication tool to reach out to faculty, staff, students and visitors. In addition to more locations being added, the following trends are developing:

• Automation of live content based on time, location, and user interaction, two-way messaging
• Connecting big screens (digital signage) with small screens (mobile phones) and desktop PC screens
• More content and application integration
• Increased student involvement in content publishing
• Large screen, desktop screen and mobile phone screens
• From nice-to-have to must-have.

As digital signage transforms itself from a standalone system to an integrated part of the digital communication platform on campus including Web, desktop PCs and mobile phones, it will increasingly become part of the must-have digital life on campus.

Alex Wang is president and CTO of Fremont, Calif.-based Dynasign Corp., a digital signage technology company that offers Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for out-of-home target-casting networks, including retail, hospitality, education, healthcare and corporate communications. At Digital Signage Expo 2010, Wang and Jimmy Dun, Dynasign vice president of business development, are leading Lunch & Learn discussion groups on the topic “Making Digital Signage Screens Part of Campus Life through Dynamic Content.” 

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