Looking to improve your campus signage? If you’re responsible for a university’s facilities management, it is essential to maintain clear, accessible, and appropriate signage. This type of visual communication is used by students, visitors, and faculty alike — to find their way around, get crucial information, and advertise events.
Of course, campus digital signage also creates a strong sense of brand and community. Done right, it’s a transformative tool that encourages a sense of community and confidence in your institution, while improving facilities services across the board.
Today, we explain why it’s time to go digital and how to make the most of digital signage in your educational institution.
With Yodeck, creating professional and attractive digital campus signage has never been easier. If you want to create content that makes an impact and delivers your messages to students and staff, as well as to any visitor, then Yodeck is the right solution for you.
What are the benefits of digital signage for universities?
Digital campus signage has several advantages over print material options. So if you haven’t already gone digital, it’s time to get started.
Here are just a few benefits of using university digital signage :
- Increase engagement. Entertain and engage your student audience with options for interactive messaging, “gamification”, and generating that all-important school spirit.
- Drive awareness. For whatever you like! Whether that’s university policies, sporting activities, facilities, lecture programs, or student and staff accomplishments.
- Streamline branding. Create, manage and update all your signage from one central location. This helps with streamlining inter-departmental approval and adherence to university branding guidance.
- Create a sense of community. Invite students and faculty to contribute ideas for signage, creating eye-catching content that’s specific to your campus community.
- Improve safety. Keep everyone informed in the case of a rapidly developing emergency with alerts and warnings. Delivering real-time emergency information can make the difference between disaster and mitigation, reducing the impact and potentially saving lives.
- Sustainability. Save money as well as improve your environmental footprint by not printing and pulping hundreds of paper posters, banners and flyers.
- Effective wayfinding. If you’ve got building work on campus (for example), you can quickly and easily update your wayfinding signage to include disruptions and alternatives in your directional signs.
Linking all these benefits is the ability to create and update signage in moments. Your signage project can now include graphic tools and concentrate management into one centralized location. From there you can update digital notice boards across your entire campus. These seemingly small touches make the university space feel more welcoming and safe, streamlines your branding, and helps students and faculty find the information they need.
What are the main uses of digital campus signage?
There are so many ways to effectively use digital campus signage. Here are just a few ideas.
- Advertising any campus event. Pull-in info from calendars (think movie nights, drama groups, and guest speakers), promote various clubs, or encourage people to sign-up for further event reminders with QR codes on digital signage for events. University marketing can now be enhanced with digital screens that offer more than a simple paper banner.
- Digital menu boards. Student life is synonymous with cafeterias. You can now remotely advertise and update digital menu boards for food vendors, cafés, and restaurants across your campus. Live data on wait times and lines, nutritional information, and regularly changing specials are all options.
- Communicating local information. Think about what your students and faculty need and want. Is this traffic updates, rolling news, updates on cultural festivals, or campus and church worship events ? Combine local info with calendar apps for handy automation and create digital info hubs around your campus facilities.
- Fostering student community. You can upgrade your university communications by creating playlists from hashtags on a social media wall to improve student participation and engagement. Highlighting research group achievements or current student affairs is also a great way of fostering community and pride.
- Improving campus security . We all know how important information and alerts in an emergency situation are. Evacuation information, real-time updates, and a high-visibility sign help you react swiftly and communicate with the entire campus in any worst-case scenarios.
- Campus wayfinding signage. Gone are the days of wayfinding signage just being a few arrows here and there. Instead, think of a campus map tailored to specific events and areas, nearest exit doors and water fountains, or updates in the case of elevator malfunctions, construction work, or building closures. This type of wayfinding signs can animate mundane campus planning with a new sparkle.
- Library and meeting room updates . Simplify the process of checking bookings with conference room digital signage and computer availability to streamline student and faculty experience. You could also encourage staff and students to get involved with book recommendations, highlighting new library arrivals or fun research questions through library digital signage displays.
- Highlight environmental initiatives . Sustainability is more important than ever for universities. Encourage green behavior with real-time energy usage stats on digital information boards. What about weekly or monthly goals for students and staff to get involved with?
For more inspiration on layouts and the uses of digital signage, explore our collection of free school signage templates as well as more ideas for employing digital signage in educational settings.
With Yodeck, you have access to hundreds of apps (to drag and drop things like birthday announcements, menu boards, social feeds, and calendars into your displays). We also provide free templates (created by expert graphic designers) so you can create dazzling layouts in a matter of seconds without the need of external creative services.
Each template is fully customizable, so you can tailor designs to your university’s specific branding and communications guidelines. Simply drag and drop images, make any text changes… and away you go.
New York University and Yodeck: A digital signage case study
To delve deeper into the massive potential of digital campus signage, let’s explore a real-life case study. With Yodeck capability, New York University created and displayed live environmental data that genuinely improved staff and students’ college experience.
The need
An “Environmental Sensing Group” at New York University (NYU) received an award to install air quality monitors and live data displays at their Shanghai campus.
The need was simple — how best to display this data? The project lead (based in New York) considered solutions like a static website, but discounted this due to issues refreshing pages and lack of visibility.
The solution
Yodeck offered NYU the perfect solution for remotely managing and updating live data screens—controlled from New York and displayed in Shanghai. For the NYU team, a cost-effective digital signage solution that provided pin-sharp accuracy for live data visualizations was vital.
With Yodeck’s Enterprise Plan , the team could quickly and easily connect any sign in Shanghai with a Raspberry Pi media player to the digital signage network. They then placed these screens in high-footfall common areas.
With the ability to quickly and easily upload content via the Yodeck web app, any Shanghai current student, visitor and faculty member could view live air quality data in real-time with this innovative interior signage.
The results
With Yodeck’s technology, the NYU team had a quick and affordable way of making information instantly accessible to staff and students at their Shanghai campus.
In addition, the digital screens created a streamlined, professional appearance — powered by a credit card-sized Raspberry Pi at the back of each sign.
Thanks to Yodeck’s versatility, the team didn’t have to develop a specialized web interface, saving both time and money. With our cloud-based technology, they were also able to make real-time edits from anywhere in the world—creating signage that was scalable and easy to manage.
Perhaps most importantly, Yodeck’s digital signage tools enabled effective cross-campus communication, highlighting environmental information quickly and efficiently whilst protecting the NYU brand.
Read more about the University of New York and their pioneering Yodeck live data project in our in-depth case study.
Get started with digital campus signage with Yodeck
Digital signage offers the opportunity to transform your campus signage. It helps reach and engage students, improves the way you share information, and enhances your university community.
Visitors, staff, and faculty members can also benefit, with opportunities to highlight university departments, staff milestones, and environmental initiatives or just make it easier for people to find their way around site.
Finally, digital signage enhances your brand and positions your institution as a leader in our information-rich digital environment. It’s simply a must-have for any modern campus.
With Yodeck, you can create, edit, and update your designs in a matter of moments. Read more about Yodeck’s key features and get started with a free account today.