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Connecting to the connected generation with on-campus digital signage

How colleges and universities can use digital signage to reach students, but also faculty, visitors and staff.

May 3, 2013 by Christopher Hall

As the younger always-connected generation heads to college, digital signage is being used to reach out to those students and to bridge the gap between stodgy older institutions and brash digital natives.

"[Digital signage] is an application that has been well-adopted within the educational industry and certainly it's one that is growing at a very rapid rate," Omnivex Corp. CEO Jeff Collard said in a recent webinar hosted by DigitalSignageToday.com.

To wit, 2,200 campuses in North America were expected to deploy digital signage systems in 2011, up from 1,500 the year before, according to eCampus News and Northern Sky Research, for a total in 2011 of 13,000 displays across those campuses.

The webinar, "Creating Real-Time Interactions with Digital Signage in Higher Education,"was sponsored by digital signage software provider Omnivex, and Collard led the presentation along with Byron Tarry, the director of strategic business development for Sharp's Audio Visual, which has installed digital signage systems in numerous educational institutions across Canada.

The premise behind the webinar was that engaging and interacting with a generation of students raised surrounded by media is driving significant change amongst colleges and universities: Students today expect and prefer digital communications, and as a result digital signage has become a cost-effective tool for schools to utilize to improve communications ranging from emergency notifications to wayfinding to events and employee communications.

Digital signage fits somewhere in between the mass media of TV and cable channels and the personal media of smartphones and tablets, Collard said, creating a kind of targeted media in which messages can be tailored to small groups or the individual but dispersed over a wider area or network.

And targeting that message is actually one of the first challenges faced by higher education institutions, Tarry said. Doing the footwork to determine a core strategy and a core group of stakeholders and to understand who the targeted audience is, is critical, he said.

"Finding an organization that has actually spent the time appropriately upfront ... is a big challenge," he said. "The struggle really is trying to make sense of what is often a relatively limited needs analysis that's occurred to date."

And there are generally a significant number of different audiences higher ed facilities need to consider, Collard said, from students to faculty to visitors to operations staff behind the scenes.

The institutions also need to be sure to set goals beforehand, to understand the measurable goals for ROI, from reduced costs to improved emergency messaging to improved campus-wide communications, he said.

Digital signage also can touch on a wide swath of campus life, Collard said. It can providewayfinding for new students and visitors; it can provide nutritional information on digital menu boards in the school dining hall; it can show video on the scoreboard in the school gym; and it can provide crisis response and direction in times of emergency.

The speakers also looked at potential pain points for institutions to help them head off later problems. For instance, Coallrd referred to a school that had posted a digital sign with large amount of small, difficult-to-read-quickly text in a stairwell, a place where you don't want people stopping to read a sign.

"One of the things you need to do is think about the various locations [for digital signage] and how do you map traffic flow," he said. "One of the big challenges ... is having a clear content strategy, understanding what you want to say, who you want to say it to, and how you want to say it."

Click here to download an on-demand version of the webinar, and for more information on higher ed digital signage and to see more on some of the data referred to in the webinar, take a look at the DigitalSignageToday.com infographic "Big Screen on Campus."

Learn more about digital signage in education.