Digital signage is about connection, sharing information and engaging audiences. It’s no wonder then that the realm of education – where community, learning and engagement are also key – is quickly embracing digital signage. It’s one thing to attend a school, but another to feel like part of a larger community and be connected to your fellow students, faculty and administrators. Digital signage helps bridge that gap.
There are many ways campuses can use digital signage. Here are just a few of them.
1. Branding
Whether it’s private or public, a school is a brand. Like any commercial product, schools must promote and reinforce a certain brand name and image to attract the best students, faculty and philanthropists. Faith and trust in that brand keeps schools afloat and allows them to grow.
On an aesthetic level, a school’s branding elements include its name, acronym, colors, font, logo, mascot, symbols and motto. Incorporating these elements into your digital signage content can help reinforce your brand and keep messaging consistent. Having branded templates at your disposal is an easy way to incorporate branding into your content – just add your own text and images to instantly create announcements, event promotions, schedules and more. CrownTV can even create these for you, like the one below for Sciences-U in Lyon, France.
2. Connecting students and campuses
Behind every great school is a body of students who feel connected to one another and the institution. However, it can be difficult to foster that sense of connection when campuses are often large and students come and go at all hours. It’s even more difficult when a school has satellite campuses in different cities, or for “commuter schools” where students do not live on campus. Fortunately, the most effective use of digital signage in any industry is fostering connection, with schools being no exception.
One of the most exciting things you can do with digital signage is display a social media feed of posts mentioning a hashtag of your choice. Schools in particular can display posts by students, faculty, administrators, visitors, or anyone else hashtagging the school on social media. Students get to see their fellow students’ posts and photos all on one screen, even if they’ve never met before. Talk about connection! And if your school has satellite campuses, even better – students on one campus can see posts by students on other campuses, near or far.
Digital signage also keeps the campus itself connected. By having multiple screens on campus with consistent branding and messaging, even the largest of campuses will feel much more unified. Displaying campus maps and directories helps everyone get to wherever they need to be and find what they’re looking for. And so on. Not to mention, being able to remotely update any screen’s content ensures all information stays accurate and current.
3. Building a strong community
A strong community is the lifeblood of any campus. In addition to enhancing the student experience, it reflects well on the school, showing others that the student body desires to do more than just show up for class. Just like workers should feel engaged at their job, students should feel a sense of belonging and pride in their school.
For a strong community to flourish, students need to be informed of campus happenings and encouraged to participate in various aspects of student life. Digital signage can help with this by:
- Promoting events – Sports games, pep rallies, activity fairs, fundraisers, guest lectures
- Acknowledging accomplishments by the institution and its students (awards, rankings, sports victories, etc.)
- Spreading school spirit – Share words of encouragement for the school’s sports teams, promote upcoming athletic events, remind students to wear school colors and merchandise on certain days, celebrate victories
- Encouraging participation in student government – Tell students how they can stay informed on the issues, vote in elections, volunteer on campaigns or even run for office
- Promoting student groups, clubs and organizations – Showcase what’s out there for students, how they can get involved, and meeting dates, times and locations
Digital signage is especially useful for displaying this kind of information, since it needs to be updated constantly. Doing this with paper signage is tricky, but with digital signage it takes just a few clicks from a web-based dashboard.
4. Attracting prospective students
As we alluded to in #1, a school is a product that needs to be sold to prospective students (and their parents!). There are many ways of doing so, but one of the biggest opportunities to reach prospective students is when they’re visiting campus. They’ve already shown interest by coming to campus, so why not close the deal with the help of digital signage?
Putting excellence on display is a solid strategy for selling your school to prospective students. Use digital signage to show off what your school takes pride in, like academic achievement, superior faculty or winning athletics programs. Other selling points may include your school’s housing options, financial assistance programs, vibrant student and campus life, safety precautions, notable amenities or surrounding attractions. Image slideshows are a great way to exhibit this type of content. Also consider displaying social media to emphasize the student community and what others are saying about the school.
Display visitor-oriented content on screens placed in high-traffic areas for prospective students and their parents, like the admissions office or information booths. It should be one of the first things they see upon their campus visit.
5. Wayfinding
Campuses both large and small can be difficult to navigate, with even long-time students getting lost every once in awhile. You certainly don’t want students to get lost on their first day, or first-time visitors to become overwhelmed and frustrated with finding where they need to go. Help everyone find their way by using digital signage for wayfinding, or displaying campus maps and directories.
Using paper signage for displaying campus maps may seem like a no-brainer, but these maps are prone to frequent changes – think new construction, renaming of buildings or temporary closures of certain facilities. Rather than having to print out new maps every time changes occur, digital signage allows you to make changes in your dashboard and instantly update maps on any of your screens. Change is even more inevitable when it comes to directories of faculty and administrators, making easy updating that much more crucial.
You can display digital campus maps and directories on multiple screens all over campus, ensuring help is always right around the corner. Updating one map through the dashboard is just as easy as updating 20 of them, so keeping the maps accurate remains simple.
6. Informing students, faculty and visitors
With hundreds or thousands of students, faculty and visitors coming and going from campus at all times, it’s challenging – but that much more important – to keep everyone updated with important news, information and announcements. Digital signage alleviates this challenge, as it enables you to reach people on campus when and where it matters.
How so? For one, you can place displays in high-traffic areas of campus where students, faculty or visitors frequently spend time or pass as they’re walking. You can also schedule content to display only when the most people are likely to be on campus – weekdays when classes are in session, for instance.
Here are some examples of informational content to display:
- News – Display your school’s RSS feed, or national news headlines
- Announcements and reminders – Upcoming holidays, openings and closures, deadlines, rules
- Event details – Who, what, when, where
- Operating hours
- Local weather
- Interesting trivia and historical facts about the school
- Visitor info – When and where campus tours begin, parking information, gift shop hours, where to find help
7. Graduation ceremonies
Digital signage is a hit at graduations, making the experience even more memorable for students, faculty and attendees alike. Forget boring printed programs – go digital instead!
Here are a few things digital signage can be used to display during the ceremony:
- Photos and video
- Speaker information
- Students’ names and portraits as they receive their diplomas
- Names of awards and their recipients
- Personalized shout-outs from family members to their graduate
- Social media (have students use a special graduation hashtag and see their post on screen during the ceremony!)
Also remember that you can schedule content ahead of time to display in a certain order or at specific times during the ceremony. Planning the event just got that much easier.
Whether you’re a small private school or a public university with tens of thousands of students, you’ll discover countless benefits to using digital signage. Request a demo of CrownTV’s software and a representative will get in touch with you to discuss your specific needs.