Pacific have been installing and supporting digital signage solutions, and the hardware to display them, for many years. We’ve put displays in sales or customer service call centre floors, in reception areas, canteens, and staff rooms to help organisations communicate key messages. But take a tour around most organisations, and you’ll still see plenty of non-digital internal comms – posters (professional and otherwise!) still dominate. Internal communications is still very important to employee satisfaction, maintaining or building desired culture, safety of the employees, and continued accreditation to many standards – it’s not surprising to see so much around. So, this post is a reminder of the advantages of digital signage in meeting this critical requirement.

Speed and Flexibility of Deployment:

Here’s the big one that has traditionally driven digital signage take up – you can update the content at the flick of a switch (or correct mistakes!). Traditional formats like posters take time to create and distribute, and if you aren’t in the locations, you can’t see if they are even up (or down when no longer relevant!). Because you can change it quickly, you can make more changes – updating for one-off events for example, or updating for the context – like certain content only coming up in the afternoon, or on weekends, or only in certain locations.

Capture Attention:

In a world filled with info, there is a competition for the attention of your audience. It’s easier to win that competition with moving and changing images and with sound than will printed material. It important to prioritise capturing attention with internal communications – if employee feedback suggests people aren’t taking in the information, then that reflects badly on internal communications.

Multi-Channel:

We are now a distributed workforce – with international colleagues, colleagues working from home, remote team members like sales and engineers and many others. They may not all get to see traditional digital signage displays in workplaces, just like they wouldn’t see posters – but many modern signage platforms are multi-channel – so the same content that you design and deploy to the screens can be deployed in other places – on an intranet, via a company App, on laptop screensavers, via internal social media etc. This makes the digital signage an integral part of a wider system that reflects the modern workplace and it’s challenges.

KPI Data:

Most digital signage platforms allow you to incorporate live data. This often includes publicly available live data such as stock prices, weather reports, travel data and the like – but more powerfully it can incorporate organisational KPI’s. This approach fulfils a valuable need – keeping everyone focused on the targets and sharing the performance data openly. Many platforms have inbuilt functions to retrieve data directly from websites, databases, timetabling and calendaring systems, well-known business applications like SAP, Sage, Salesforce, etc. Most have integrations with PowerBI and other reporting tools to directly use the reports you’ve invested in.

Models good environmental approach:

As a responsible organisation, you’ve probably got targets to reduce your environmental impact – and printing, distributing, and disposing of internal comms materials (sometimes espousing ecological advice!) is not modelling that behaviour for your colleagues. Digital Signage has always been less wasteful than paper alternatives, and now includes many “e-paper” type displays especially for signage that consume even less electricity.

Maximising Asset Use and Integrated Internal Comms:

You’ve almost certainly already got screens around the organisation – displays in meeting rooms, in canteens, in receptions, multi-purpose spaces, room booking panels, on desks. Another important advantage of digital signage is that many platforms let you use these for internal comms with when they aren’t being used for their other purpose – getting more return on the investment in the screen – or reducing the investment needed in signage upfront.

It also has the effect of integrating internal comms into the normal line of business. For example, if the screens in the canteen are showing TV channels AND your messaging, there’s a higher chance it’ll get to your audience. If the screens you walk past all the time are conveying a particular piece of information, the more places people see it the more it will cut through.

Reduces effort to standardise on a brand voice:

Finally, digital signage makes it so much easier to create an internal communications brand. Shared resources and templates can be uploaded and worked on together with distributed internal comms colleagues, and most platforms include advanced ways to control who can control what around the business. These controls allow you to get the best mix of central oversight with local content and context.

Conclusion:

There are still plenty of reasons to continue the push to incorporate digital signage solutions into Internal Communications. Pacific can help connect you with the right platform for your needs – with partnerships with many manufacturers. We’d match you up with the right one based on your priorities – integration with TV, multi-channel, cost, levels of control etc etc. Our experience with deployment means we can overcome most challenges we’ve come across in installing the hardware needed – like creating wireless solutions, using AV over IP, streaming, liaising with building contractors for challenging locations (including outdoor) and others.

Finally, we can work to provide training to the users of the system, or an outsourced service to upload and schedule the content you want.

Contact the Pacific team now to discuss your internal comms requirements, and you and your organisation will soon be benefitting from the above.