Webinar: A Safer Campus Starts with Dependable Technology

TRANSCRIPT

Well, I think we're gonna go ahead and get started. So we are recording today, and, so if you have somebody on your team that you would love to share this with later, we'll certainly, work that out with you. So I wanna go ahead and get started. My name's Eric Henry from Carousel. We are, having this webinar, A Safer Campus Starts with Dependable Technology.

And and so I well, first, I wanna start with my friend, Tim. If you could just introduce yourself and who you are, and then we'll kinda talk about agenda and next steps here.

Yeah. Thanks, Eric. Tim Choluta with BrightSign. I've been with BrightSign about eighteen years, believe it or not.

So it's been a it's been a wild ride. It's been great. And I was on the sales side for most of that. Just joined what we call our partnership team, at the beginning of this year, which handles our CMS partnerships of which, Carousel back in the day, was called Tightrope, and, they were our very first CMS partner.

So we have a long history together, and I'm I'm really happy to be, joining here.

Yes. We do. And so, yes, you and I have actually worked together for about twelve years, which is kind of wild to think about. So so, Eric Henry from Carousel. So I also work on business architecture partnerships.

Safety is definitely near and dear to my heart. And so so Tim and I are gonna kinda walk through things here with you today. We'll click on the right screen so I can advance my slides. Alright. So as far as agenda, is what we wanna really wanna talk about today is is how we can leverage campus wide communication both to create engagement and then also really help with emergency management. And so we're gonna give a little bit of context before we walk through all of the things because I think it might be helpful, and then really talking about how technology plays a role in engagement and wellness and all of those types of things. And before we really get into it, I wanna I wanna share with with all of you the the intent of this webinar today is to be very conversational.

And so we're gonna have a few questions throughout the conversation. We're also gonna have a poll at the end so that you can let us know if there's something that sparked a particular interest, and we can get you connected in that way. We have q and a at the end as well. So as we seed a few questions throughout the conversation, I really am hoping that that you can type in some chat and share some ideas or questions that you might have.

Some of these are gonna be, hey, what's working well for you or what are you struggling with in your environment? Because ultimately, this whole topic is a hard topic. And Tim and I, our organizations care a lot about how we equip educational institutions to address these things on campus. And so whether you're a Carousel customer or not, if you're a BrightSign customer or not, we wanna just help give you guys the ideas to think about and maybe a few tools to bring back to your organizations, and we certainly hope that we can have the opportunity to keep the conversation going with you.

But that's kind of our heart in this whole conversation is is to to give you some some ideas and tools to hear from one another. So even, like I said, as we go forward and I prompt some questions, I really wanna encourage you to to type in the chat. We have Mitch on the call. We have Claire.

So we have our team kinda helping us facilitate the conversation.

And hopefully, by the end of this, you'll leave with a few nuggets or next steps or things that you wanna have conversations with your team about or with our teams if we can be helpful to you. So that's what I wanna say going forward. Tim, if you have any other comments on the webinar before we get started?

No. I think we're good.

I think we're good? Alright. Alright. So let's do it. Oh, here. I got this little partnership slide.

So we already kind of alluded to the fact that we've been we've been partners for a long, long time. We work pretty closely between our software and BrightSign's hardware and and all of the things. And we'll share we'll share a few a few bit, bits of, info a little later on in terms of how that really plays out. But hopefully, everybody on on this webinar just knows that our teams work very closely together to make sure that it's a seamless and reliable experience, and we'll talk about why we believe that matters.

I'm actually gonna start with this idea of the four phases of emergency management. And so what what we see across, all the interactions that we have with people, when when we invite people to a call like this or have this particular conversation, especially, unfortunately, in the world in which we're living right now, the immediate thought that we have typically moves right to this idea of responding in an emergency.

And so the rest of this discussion won't make a whole lot of sense if I don't actually start here and say, when we, after COVID, started to hear from teachers and institutions the the difficulty with kids coming back to campus, all of the things around that, we started to really expand our understanding of what emergency preparedness and response really looks like. And we started talking with psychologists and leaders in in different places, and we learned a lot. And so I really wanna set the stage for the conversation to say we think about emergency management really in four phases.

Most of the conversation centers around this one we call respond, but we really want to think about, okay, what does prevention look like?

And what does preparation for emergency response look like? How do we prepare a campus to respond in an emergency or even be aware of the types of things that they need to know?

And so we'll expand on that idea a little bit.

Clearly responding, that's a lot probably where the conversation will be today around, hey. What what is a cap alert and how does that work and and what does BrightSign do and how does Carousel make it work? Certainly, response is an important part of the equation. But then there's this fourth piece, which is recover, and that is also a really important part of the conversation. So how do we connect students with parents and what what do we mean by recover?

And so, hopefully, if you if you leave today, even with just a little more expanded thinking around this whole emergency management equation, hopefully, that's helpful to you in terms of, oh, yeah. I was just thinking about, like, this thing going to this thing and putting a message on a screen, but there's so much more to the story. And so I wanted to start with that because then hopefully that will help this next slide make sense, which is why in the world are you talking about engagement?

How does that connect with this emergency response thing?

And so our what we're gonna submit to you today is that that engagement really starts with campus wide communication.

And so the more engaged our students are, whether it's in in a k twelve school or in a higher ed institution, they are aware of the things that are happening on campus. They're showing up to the things that are on campus. They're connected with their peers. We believe that that's super important to a thriving campus community, and that's actually the underpinning of a really healthy campus.

Before we go on, Tim, I'd love for you to answer this question for me. I'm curious how you see BrightSign's reliability and maybe even speak a little bit to BrightSign's reliability.

How does that factor into making sure that these messages that we want to deliver to students actually show up when it really counts?

Sure. Yeah. So for the folks that are on, if you don't know BrightSign, we are a hardware manufacturer. We make a little digital media player, that the carousel software runs on top of. So, you know, the reliability is is one of our biggest pillars that that makes BrightSign on the hardware side so compelling is that the fact that they have a very low failure rate. They are just made for running digital signage software like Carousel.

And that uptime really does play into, you know, a a vertical like, like campuses.

You know, students are around at all times of the day, and they need information.

And, like Eric mentioned, you know, it does kinda create a sense of community when everyone is on the same page. They get the same kind of, you know, communications.

Excellent.

Alright. So thank you for that. So just giving you guys a little bit. Definitely don't wanna spend most the bulk of the conversation on on engagement, but I wanna give you guys the context around what we mean by engagement and opportunities around that.

So so the first thing around engagement on campus certainly is guiding and welcoming people. If we don't know where we go I actually heard a phrase one time called navigational anxiety. That's a real thing, where peep I don't know where I'm going. I don't know how to get from here to there or I'm new.

And so one of the ways of engaging people is is really making it easy for people to find their way around. That's a big part of what we do together with signage, and and we have all the tools to guide and welcome students and parents and guests to our campuses.

Also with academics, really important. We're seeing this especially in higher education when we can make sure that students are aware of all the services they're currently not taking advantage of. I'm sure some of you might be able to relate to that on this call. But when we talk about engagement, how do we get students to show up to study halls into, Thursday night with the history department, meet and greets, those types of things that are really important for a vibrant campus life and successful academics.

Hey. Did you know we had a writing center to help you prepare for this, essay that you're submitting? Those types of things. And and so really around academics and engaging students.

And, again, the more places we can put that, and we'll talk about that in a second. And, obviously, a big part of why we're here today is safety. And so the places where we can have these dedicated BrightSign players driving these screens all over campus. There's lots of screens in lots of places nowadays and certainly, engaging people with safety messaging.

And a lot of that is even you can see in this example, a drill. Like, it's not always the emergency itself. It is how do you do you know what you need to do in an emergency? Do you know that when you're walking to your car at ten o'clock at night that there's actually escorts available, to bring you to the parking garage on a large campus like the University of Minnesota or those types of things?

And then housing, we're finding in housing really a lot of opportunities.

Clearly, this is a higher ed thing unless you're a really, really nice k twelve private school, boarding school.

So in housing, there's a lot of opportunity too. A lot of universities, like our friends at Harvard and University of Kentucky and some of those, Harvard has a house system and and pretty much a lot of their connection and relationship is related to, I'm part of Mather House, and so what's going on at Mather House is really important in terms of engagement of the students in campus life. And so just really thinking about engagement in that way as well.

And then some pretty cool things, like we've done some really cool projects together even in athletics. And so things like locker rooms, like this one here we see at Clemson and in other schools, another great way of of using digital signage together.

And really this idea that as we think about engagement across campus, we know and I often say if I'm on webinars or on podcasts or those types of things to think about our communication strategy much like we think about a marketing strategy. And so when we think about a marketing strategy, it's like, okay. Where where do I need this information to show up?

What do I want people to know? Who needs to see it? What's the call to action? How do we measure it?

All of those types of things. And so really thinking about our engagement communication strategy like a marketing strategy. And and being able to do that campus wide is really important with marketing. We want people to see that message three, five, seven times because we know that's what it takes to cut through the noise.

And that's really, around again, an engagement strategy. It can't just be a one and done or on one type of screen. And so that's where, we think it's really important to be thinking about how do we engage students on campus with really relevant information and very clear call to action so that they come and be part of something. And, again, why we started with engagement is because we understand that connected students in campus life is really important.

I had an opportunity one time to sit around and hear from a lot of higher ed provosts, and they were sharing that it was very hard to get students to show up to things on campus. And it didn't matter where you came from, didn't matter if you were a two year school, a four year school, if you were Ivy League or not. And if you had a four point o in high school, what we're seeing is students not as engaged as they could be. And so a lot of times, it's just because they're not aware.

And so we really think engagement is a very important part of a healthy, vibrant campus life.

Alright.

Question for the audience because I've already been talking for a little while.

I'm curious if you had a magic wand to improve student engagement, what would you fix first? Would you fix the speed at which you communicate with students, how well you can target those students, the reach of the communication that you have, like the visual appeal. Is it hard for you guys to create the content?

When you're trying to engage students and communicate with them on campus, I'm just really curious.

If you had the magic wand, what would you wave to to really fix to help improve that? Do you send out a giant newsletter that nobody reads or emails or or you're already using digital signage and it's just not proving effective for you? I'm I'm just really curious if you could type that into the chat. Mitch can certainly bubble those up in a little while here or when we get to the q and a, but I would love to hear from the audience if there's something around engagement that that's on your mind that you think would be really helpful within your organization or even share a story of something you found very effective that maybe even surprised you that might be helpful for for the rest of the group.

And, Mitch, I'll just say interrupt me at any time if you've got if you've got one or two to share.

Oh, we got cool little I forgot about this part.

Oh, yeah. Look at that.

Carousel everywhere. Look at that.

Alright.

Okay, Mitch. If if we have nothing, I'll just keep kinda rolling along here, and maybe we'll circle back to it here in the q and a. So so as far as wellness and safety, again, we we mentioned at the top of the call that that there's really four phases to emergency management. And so we wanna talk a little bit about what we mean and what we see working within both k twelves and higher eds around wellness and safety specifically in terms of content and those types of things.

So, again, delivering this content the the types of content that we're really trying to deliver across the signage network are things like promoting mental health resources. So, again, in a in a k twelve social work, capabilities or counseling services within a k twelve environment. In higher education, certainly, we have a lot of resources now on campuses that are being invested in. And a lot of students are either they either don't know or there's a stigma attached with using those resources, and we believe there's a really, really big opportunity for us to promote the use of mental health resources.

And, certainly, the messaging around that is critically important. And then this idea of fostering a culture of belonging, again, that that kinda ties back in with the engagement piece. The more students are showing up to pep fests and the football game and those types of things, the more engaged they are in a vibrant campus life, typically are are in a healthier place. Or we can see that there are signs that that they need to be, reached out to or supported a little bit better.

And, again, clearly, around enhancing campus safety, one of the things we heard very clearly in k twelve is when especially after COVID, kids coming back to school, even drills. Like, some of these kids had never even experienced things like safety drills. And so allowing students and preparing students for what to expect was very, very helpful in kind of bringing down the anxiety level. Hey.

The drill is happening a week from now. Here's here's where you go. Here's how your posture is when you're in a tornado drill, like you'd be in Minnesota. I don't know what it looks like in a hurricane.

Maybe it's the same. I'm not sure. So, Tim, you can probably speak to that because you're in the south. Right?

So, anyway so, again, like, proactively helping students think through some of the some of the campus safety posture things. And then again, this fourth one, really encouraging participation. That's that's really critical on campus, and it it sort of kinda ties in with this idea of engagement around campus. Like, how do we invite students to participate?

Because participation is really important in, again, in building relationships. A lot of people feel alone or disconnected even when they're surrounded by people, and so how how do we connect people in environments where they where they really feel like they will thrive?

Eric, I have a quick comment to, interject. Back to the engagement question, we got a response from Conrad who said, making it easier for content to be created, managed, and published to our BrightSigns.

Okay.

Alright. I think we could certainly help with some of those things.

So one of the things just really quickly, related to that, around the creation side, there are so many powerful tools nowadays. Right? Canva is a very popular tool. There are other popular tools.

And and so one of the things that just just so that the audience knows with Carousel, we've thought especially in the education space, we've looked at what tools do educators typically use. So Google Slides, the Microsoft Suite, Canva, those types of things. And so what we've what we've done is work pretty closely with BrightSign, especially because, again, the power of BrightSign's technology, their their player allows us to do some really cool things together in terms of how that content created in Canva renders on a BrightSign player through Carousel. And so, certainly, that's a conversation we could we could have offline with you, Conrad.

I'd love for you to connect with us. But, yes, it's very important to have tools I already use creating content that looks good and is visually appealing and can get scheduled very, very quickly and just show up. And so there's definitely tools for that, and, we'd love to share more of those with you. Any other things so far, Mitch?

That is it, everything.

Alright. We will keep rolling then.

Okay. So, again, four phases of emergency management. Gonna talk a little bit about what we mean by that in terms of prevent, prepare, and recover primarily, like, what those look like. I think response, most of you probably get an idea, but we will certainly cover all four. And so when we start talking about idea of prevention, again, we talked a little bit engagement is very important on the prevention side and making sure even as we shared the the different health and wellness, aspects of things, displaying mental health resources, running things like, anti bullying campaigns, positive reinforcement, celebrating people. All of those types of things really go a long way in the prevention side of things.

And and, actually, tying back to Conrad's point, one of the things that we heard a lot when we started talking with especially k twelve instructors were it was very difficult for them to get the content to run the anti bullying campaign, for example. So as Carousel, we thought, well, we we don't care if you're a Carousel customer or not. Certainly, we love to have more customers. But if we can help schools, whether they're using our software or somebody else's, run these campaigns to create a healthier school environment.

Let's let's give you the the content. And so we worked pretty closely with some people to create a lot of content that that educators wanted to use on their signage networks. And so just know if you're on this call and you're not a Carousel customer, reach out to us anyway, and we would love to share some of these resources that we've created over time for free with you. It's just part of trying to support schools in terms of the mental health stuff, anti bullying, all these other things that we've learned from from schools that are doing really cool stuff, and we will share that content with you.

And and there's lots of ways you can get it out to a bright side box. And so we'd love to to share that with you, but that's really how we see the prevention side of things is is, again, raising more and more awareness, getting people to show up to things, increasing engagement with students on campus.

As far as preparation, I kind of alluded to this a little bit ago.

Really simulating the drills and and helping everybody understand how to respond in an emergency is really an important thing. And, unfortunately, even if there isn't an emergency, we're seeing in our communities a lot more lockdowns.

My kids' school has lockdowns because they're right by the the county courthouse. And so anytime something happens at the county courthouse, there's things at the school. It really helps when they've already gone through those motions, and it's on an unfortunate reality of the world that we live in today. But what we find is the more that we can prepare people for what to expect, where to go, what it looks like, it helps reduce some of the anxiety around what that looks like in preparation.

And this third bullet point here, automate cap alerts, this is a this is a technical thing that is really important. Basically, the idea being that if we do have an emergency, we have zero time to think. Right? Like, we're we're not thinking about, like, what message should I create?

We've we would do all of the work with you ahead of time to think about when this happens, this message shows up. This is how the police trigger it, or this is when the alarm system goes off, it triggers this message on the signage, and here's how it works with BrightSign. And so that's really important in the preparation side of things is thinking about what messages go where on campus and which messages shouldn't be displayed. So for example, we have some education customers that say, if we have an active shooter situation, we do not want any information going out that communicates something to that shooter.

Okay. So let's think about that. And I hate to even use that example, but it is, unfortunately, again, a thing that has to be considered. And so so those are the types of things on the preparation side. Tim, I'm curious for you.

How do you see remote management?

How does that really like, even with BrightSign's capabilities and those types of things, how do you see that playing out in terms of allowing IT or safety teams to respond faster when we get to emergency? And I haven't talked about response yet, but I'd love for you to kinda interject a little bit your thinking.

Yeah. No. It's it's it's really big. You know, having a a a central location where you can manage the actual hardware piece and know the player's uptime, you know, if they need a reboot, if there if there's something happening with a specific player, being able to, send commands to that over the wire, over the network to have it, you know, reboot, get fixed, that is, very important because it just again, it leads to the uptime, discussion that we mentioned. And, you know, if screens are down, it helps no one. Right? So, you know, having the IT department or whoever's gonna be managing, this kind of a deployment, you you know, have more information on the the player hardware and how it's, you know, performing is is paramount.

Right. Yeah. Because just as I as I've given the example of we can't think about what message needs to be delivered in an emergency, we also don't have any time to make sure the system's up. Right? So Right. To your point, like, it it's very the things that we're talking about in preparation are proactive by nature. Proactive communication, proactive preparing of people for what to expect, proactively preparing the messages for an actual emergency, proactively making sure that the network is up and reliable and healthy.

And, so that's super important. So thanks for sharing that with us, Tim. Sure.

As far as response, again, if you notice, hardly any of this conversation has been abound around response because that is actually the easiest part.

Like, shockingly, in a way, this is the easiest part of the whole equation because responding to an emergency, it may not feel that way for some of you on the call when I when I suggest that. But but this has been this has existed in Carousell software for twenty years.

Like, we've had this capability for twenty years now.

The rest of why I say it's easy is probably because it's the world we've lived in a long time.

All the other things around it and thinking about how to really holistically address this challenge, that's been the hard part and has been really probably only in the last five years where the where this is really starting to take shape. And so that's why I say, response?

Okay.

But let's talk about it. So in response, certainly instant unified messaging. What are we saying? What do people need to know? Is it a weather thing? Is it a evacuation because of flooding or water or snowstorm, schools closing early, a wing of a building is closed, a bathroom is closed, whatever. Like, there's all kinds of things that prompt a response.

And then, again, precise targeting. So one of the things, for example, that's that's pretty cool between us in our organizations is we have the ability to target messaging emergency messaging based on specific players. And so what a BrightSign player will do is say, hey. And I'm already kinda jumping ahead to the little technology part that we have a little while, but but it's really important because the power of of being able to respond let me just give an illustration. Let's say in a school, you have a bathroom that you had to close, and so you're putting up on a screen an alert that takes over the whole signage screen that says this wings bathroom is closed, and then an actual emergency happens on campus, shelter in place or those types of things.

Not only can we target what screens the emergency message goes to ahead of time, we've already decided all these things. It's like, when this event happens, trigger this screen. We can also set priority levels. And so in a situation where bathroom's closed, but we actually have a shelter in place, that shelter in place may be campus wide or in this wing of a building or one building on a larger campus or the whole campus wide, and they can all have priority levels that override each other. So that's a really powerful thing where Carousel and BrightSign are able to do that, and they're able to do that quite quickly.

So this BrightSign, this is part of, again, us working together for a lot, a lot of years, making sure that not only is the BrightSign unit uptime there and reliable and displaying what it needs to display, when it needs to instantly switch to something else, we we have worked together to make sure that that bright sign's going, hey, anything new, anything new, anything new? Okay. Wait. New message. Play it.

And we pre precache some of that content so it can get up there really, really quickly. So there's just a lot of things technically, not really the purpose of this call, but I just want everybody to understand that that's really important. When we say precise targeting, that's what we mean. Is it that one screen?

Is it this wing of a building? Is it this floor? Is it a whole building? Is it the whole campus?

And they can be different they can be different messages, different priority levels, different maps for evacuation, those types of things.

And then again, clear transitions to recovery.

So those things happen, shelter in place or a lot of times, it's just welcoming somebody. There's special assembly at three o'clock or we play the morning announcements. That's also a way that the same technology is used.

But it has to transition in recovery very quickly. So is it, hey, this is the meeting place or, hey, everything's, false alarm, everything's clear, the fire that was in the in the lunchroom is put out, whatever, go back to normal things. It has to be able to clear really quickly and get back to normal as well. So that's really important in response.

For recovery, this is really around, facilitating things like student and parent reunification.

We're gonna talk about some partners here in a second, that I'll mention around this. And then really communicating post crisis resources and then again, trying to have a plan for how do we restore normalcy.

And this was one of the ones where when I heard about the organizations doing the work in recovery, it seemed so blatantly obvious to me and I had never thought about it for a long time.

So again, on recovery, there's a lot of opportunity.

Something has happened. Okay. Now what? And I think it's really, again, important to think about proactively what does recovery look like?

What does that mean for our organization? Not just in terms of what goes up on screens but what does faculty and staff need to know? What do students need to know? How are we communicating with parents?

Some of that's not related to carousel and bright sign on campus. Some of it is. But we really wanna share again the overall picture of these four phases of emergency management.

And so with that, I would like to pause for a second and ask another question for the audience if you would consider.

And that really is which of these four phases, prevent, prepare, respond, and recover, do you feel you're strongest in right now?

And maybe which needs the most improvement? I'd love to hear kind of, Hey, never heard of any of these, never thought about it or You know what, it turns out we're pretty strong in this piece but we're kind of lacking in that piece.

If you found again some success, I would love to hear that. If there's a question you have in terms of of one of the phases that maybe is resonating with you and is a new idea, I'd love to hear that. So if you would consider, typing in the chat and sharing a a little bit with us, I'd love I'd love to hear that. So and again, Mitch, feel free to interrupt me at any time.

Tim, I'm gonna pause here.

We got your your main slide coming up here in a second. But any as we've just kinda gone along and I've done a lot of the talking, I'm curious. Any thoughts just as a dad or as a BrightSign guy that have that have been stirring in your mind that you wanna share with us?

Or With three in college right now, this it it you know, the kids roll their eyes when I'm looking behind screens and and taking a look at and pointing out, you know, signage across campus and things like that.

So it's obviously, I'm in the in the industry. We're in the industry here, so we put you know, we paid more attention to it. But, you know, you just see it so much. My three kids are at three different schools, so I get to see different campuses and how they implement this kind of thing.

And it is interesting. It does vary pretty widely. Some are doing a very good job with that. Some, you know, have, have some room to grow for sure.

So, yeah, I imagine some of the folks on the call, you know, see that within their own buildings as well in their own campuses.

Not sure if you guys saw it, but, Conrad, replied to your question again, saying that response was the stage that he needed. They needed the most improvement on.

Okay. Okay.

Excellent.

Yeah. And I'm curious. Well, this would be a great transition. Maybe we'll do this. So we're gonna start about talking about right tech.

So this is probably my my question for Conrad is, do you have a current cap provider? So here's here's kinda, like, part of this response piece that's super important would be things like single wire, Raptor, or Crisis Go. These are a few examples of partners that we work with that allow us to, and again, I'll explain what what CAP so so CAP stands for common alerting protocol. And so the government at some point got together and agreed that we should have some way of of creating a protocol that lots of organizations could use to respond in an emergency to trigger from one system to another, and that was super helpful. And this was I can't even remember what year CAP was created. It was quite a long time ago, for sure before twenty ten. So at least fifteen years old.

And what so what CAP allows us to do is is basically listen. So what Carousel does is Carousel listens for something coming from a CAP platform, and that is, again, single wire does a lot of great things with it. Raptor, Crisis Go, there are others. Even some of the, Moodle and Blackboard and some of those types of tools, the the lesson management learning management systems, those also will will send some cap alerts out.

And so it kinda starts with that. So do you have a platform in your environment that allows you to to do the responding piece? That's the first question.

And if you don't, we can certainly help connect you. There's Alertus, Everbridge. There's a whole list of of common alert, protocol platforms that are supported.

What Carousel does is we connect up with single wire or Raptor or Crisis Go, and we say, hey. When this cap alert comes, do this thing.

And then when it does that thing, we say, and do it onto these five bright sign boxes with this content.

And so it's all this is the starting point of a highly integrated, very responsive system that requires you not to think, which is super important again in an emergency. All the thinking is done upfront. Right? All the deciding is done upfront. So that's a really important part of of an emergency response process.

And while we're on this slide, I will mention that Crisis Go in particular, when I talked about the recovery piece, they spend a lot of time thinking about what recovery looks like. And then I would say Raptor as well has done that and Singlewire is is is also in that space. But we learned a lot from Crisis Go in terms of their taking school rosters, who is at school today, okay, what do we need to know, how do we connect the parents, what are we communicating, what's an SMS text strategy versus what we're putting on screens in the classrooms and all those types of things. And so it really starts with these guys and they're not obviously represented on this particular call, But this is who Carousell and BrightSign integrate with, these cap providers.

So that's the first part of the equation.

And then there's this pretty important part here. Tim, finally, you get to Yes. Maybe talk a little bit more, about so BrightSign as a media player platform, speak a little bit to to this piece of the equation. And then maybe for those on the call who don't totally understand all the inner workings of a digital signage network, like how it fits in and and why does it matter.

Sure. Yeah. Thanks. So, yeah, as as mentioned earlier, you know, BrightSign is a digital media player manufacturer, and these are our purple boxes. Proudly purple here, for since inception.

We have a variety of different models, that we sell, but the underlying case for all of these is that they are purpose built for this kind of use for digital signage.

And, what what pulls everything together for our hardware, piece is our underlying, operating system. It's a very flexible operating system. It is commercial based, not consumer based.

You know, when I say consumer, I say something like Windows, or Chrome, things like that. You know, again, leads to or, you know, lends itself to that purpose built twenty four seven playback that that BrightSign, is is known for. So you're not gonna you know, this isn't something you're gonna go shop on Amazon with or anything like that. It is purpose built for this particular, type of work. And, you know, the players, as I mentioned earlier, they come with a, the ability to monitor them on the hardware side, and Carousel has, incorporated that into their software integration.

And what that means is they they port their software onto our hardware, and it becomes a Carousel appliance.

Everything is done through the carousel software, and then they're able to obviously monitor, and control the content or you are able to monitor and control the content on via the carousel side as well as the hardware, control and monitor the hardware as well. That control piece that we offer and that, again, carousel is integrated with is free. There's no cost to it. But it gives you a good snapshot of what's happening with your player or players, across your campus or campuses. You know, a few campuses around, you know, regionally or across the country or world, you can manage that from a central location and see what the players are doing. And then at the player level itself, you know, going to that durability and that uptime and that reliability, the players, while they are networked, of course, they do store everything locally on a, on local storage, whether it's a micro SD card or an integrated SSD.

And so if the network in that campus goes down, the player the the screens don't.

They continue to play the, the content that's, you know, that they're supposed to be playing, and, and that's that's crucial. You know, you'll see some some hardware and software, pieces are network only where if the network goes, then, so goes the the display. So a big point of, of of, you know, uptime, which is, you know, as I've said is Eric's been talking about all call here is you know, it's really the most important thing, having screens showing content and giving people information.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Thank you for that.

Audience, I'm curious, especially for those of you that may be more in an IT role or a safety role, what features so so Tim just got done sharing about BrightSign's hardware.

What features are most important in Assignments Player to you? Is it around durability, the ability to manage it, its security itself?

I'm really curious as as you're thinking about the devices and you may have lots of them on your campus or maybe you have very few on your campus.

What things as you're thinking about signage networks for security, for engagement, just general purpose, or what's what's top of mind for you? I'd love for you to to type that in the chat or maybe even if we wait till the q and a time. I'd love to hear from you in terms of as you're thinking about hardware again, what really would would be the things you have top of mind in terms of questions. And so with that, we have one more slide, and then we're gonna have q and a and a poll and and those types of things.

And, so I just wanted to talk a little bit about Carousel itself and and really you know, we've talked about some of the capabilities of Carousell. One of the things, maybe a few things that I'll highlight around Carousell specifically. So what what makes Carousell unique? There's lots of partners.

BrightSign has quite a few, software partners and perhaps you're joining this call and you're a BrightSign customer, not a carousel customer, and that's quite okay.

A carousel customer for us is typically multi location, lots of people creating the content. So we're pretty good at a really simple interface that allows lots of people to create content with different user levels and permissions with approval of content. The ability to schedule each piece of content is really important to us, and that's just part If you're looking at, hey, I'm a k twelve school and I want to empower each part or if I'm a higher ed and I wanna empower each school within the university to to have control over parts of the screen, but we can wanna keep a cohesive central, IT communication strategy.

University of Minnesota is a great example of that. They have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of players, and they're very, disperse in terms of who manages their content, but some of it has to be on brand and highly controlled. And so that's really at the heart of Carousel without getting into all the technical things. We care a lot about lots of users using our stuff with lots of good control around it, the ability to integrate lots of different types of content to get out on those BrightSign boxes.

We got some back end stuff, as Tim mentioned, that will tell you if it's uptime or not and if there's an issue with the player that needs to be addressed.

And we give you all kinds of ways to connect emergency management tools and those types of things. And it comes down to we try to get the content when and where you need it.

So we put all the scheduling stuff in there. We give you all the tools to to really do that in in a powerful way, and we really we started in education. And so that's Carousel education and, like, corporate communications are the two biggest markets for us because that's that's who we serve, that's who we built the tools for, and we built them for education. So that's really Carousel.

Obviously, we could spend all kinds of time talking technical things and all those, but hopefully if you leave here, it's, hey. These Carousel guys care about helping you connect with your students and keep them safe and make them feel like they're they belong on campus and that they're part of something, and and we give you some really practical tools to do that because you've got three other jobs. That's kinda how we think about it. And, Tim, I think you think the same thing.

Right? Like, these things just gotta run. I can't spend a bunch of time configuring them and fixing them and updating OSes and all this kind of stuff. They just gotta work.

And so that's kinda if I was gonna boil it all down, that's kinda where we're at. Yeah. Mitch, I think I saw you going off mute.

Yeah. We have a, comment going back to your what, matters most question.

K.

George, I believe that's how you pronounce the name. He says, as a hardware partner, what matters most to us in a player is that it boots and connects quickly, runs fanless and stable twenty four seven, has compact form factor that fits behind displays, and offers strong connectivity options.

Options. George, are you a BrightSign rep? Because that's exactly I'm kidding. Yeah.

That's that's Did you plant that guy, Tim?

I know. Be honest. I swear it wasn't me.

No. That that that does, describe BrightSign to a t. Fanless, solid state players, no moving parts, local storage, for cash and play, and, twenty four seven playback. I mean, we have players that are probably running carousel since Eric and I met twelve years ago. And if they are not broke, they they just keep running. So that is the you know, like Eric mentioned, you know, the the ability to just set it and forget it is is is really nice.

Yeah. I have so many stories on that one, but I'll save them. Other questions.

Any other any other questions or things that we could address as we covered a few quite a few things today?

Mitch, keep tweeze teasing me by going off mute.

We got a longer, comment that I'd be happy to, read out now if there are no other additional questions at this time. This is from Alan Chavin. Hopefully, I pronounced that name right. Says, we are a school division of two hundred and twenty plus sites spanning a large metropolitan area. Approximately six sixty sites have BrightSign players.

Larger sites have ten plus players.

The district is connected through a province wide Internet.

Smaller schools have hundred megabyte per second connection. Larger sites have more.

Each school develops its own content using Google Slides.

It says we were moving towards BrightAuthor connected, to use BrightAuthor and Google Slides. We're finding the messaging the school is generating was saturating their link. We'd like to develop a better cost effective centralized solution for sixty plus current sites.

Go for it, Eric.

We can we can absolutely help with that. And so as Tim mentioned, one of the things that's important about us working together for over twelve years for example, when when BrightSign twelve years ago, a lot of the customers, because they just run, they ran the same content a lot. And so what we found is we had to work together to figure out how to really do caching well on players.

And so that's super important. So while we ingest Google Slides into Carousel, one of the things, for example, that we do is we will actually snapshot things and render them down to the player so that if you lose access to a web page or those types of things.

So the short answer is the two of us together are best in class in terms of especially at scale especially at scale. Not only for content approvals and management, but also pushing lots of video or, image content or web content around. We've thought a lot about this problem for a long, long time, especially on networks that are locked down or very, very restricted. We have some customers where it's like during business hours, we don't want you gobbling up network. So you we can't be streaming things across networks. Super important.

And and so for us and we're cloud based, so we actually have a double motivation that it costs us a lot more money. If we're if we're streaming stuff everywhere, that's not a good thing. And so we we have lots of tools, to allow at scale, and we have deployments together of thousands quite easily that that work pretty flawlessly.

So love to have that conversation with you because that's, like, wheelhouse for both of our orgs for sure.

For sure. Yeah.

Any other questions or comments?

If there's no other questions or comments, I'll launch a quick poll so we know how to follow-up with everyone. So feel free to, continue to ask questions, and we're happy to answer, and I'll just launch this poll.

For sure.

Alright. And I'm I'm happy to hang out for a minute or two if it's helpful to anyone. But, yeah, we'd certainly love to keep the conversation going around where you're at on campus and what things are important to you and how we could help.

And to fill the dead space, I'm gonna I'm gonna tell a story, Tim. So speaking to BrightSign and Carousel running seamlessly together, we did this really awesome project at Polaris, the cool side by side and snowmobile company together. Yep. And they called they called because they were trying to update their carousel bright sign thing, and they couldn't talk to the players.

And they they found out because it was a video wall, so it was, like, content that was just playing. It was playing for nine months without a Internet connection or network connection because some IT person did an audit, turned the IT the port off. That's how we knew that it was nine months. And so there's no issue with your product or our product, but we found out that Polaris IT did, like, an audit, shut off the shut off their network access.

And it just ran for nine months, and nobody noticed because it just was perfect.

Power outages booted back up, ran, just did a thing. So that's what always makes me chuckle. It's like, yep. This stuff it actually maybe works a little too good because sometimes we'd like people to upgrade.

That's right. Yeah. But No. That's great.

So Yeah.

Alright.

Alright, Claire. I'll let you kinda take over. I don't know if we shut this thing down. We just hang out or Mitch.

What do we Yeah.

Just got another question.

How Oh, good.

How does Carousel work with partners to ensure smooth integration and support for end customers?

That's a great question. Yeah. So we have, actually, BrightSign and Carousel both have, we we work not only do we work together on the tech, but we work together around the go to market because it's really it is really important to have key partners. So having a partner that understands how the software and the hardware work together and are deployed together, super important. So how we work with partners?

A lot of times customers can certainly contact us directly, and they do for support. Reach out to BrightSign directly for support. So in fact, we'll actually we know BrightSign so well that we will help. We will help the connection between Carousel and BrightSign.

We know how to troubleshoot things. We spend a lot of time equipping our key partners in terms of how to provide tier one support and troubleshooting. How do we make sure that this media player is getting this channel's content, they're both on the network, the the basic things. And so we kinda break it down into a few different buckets.

Partners are out. They're they're rolling trucks. They're installing players, making sure they're connected to networks, making sure people are trained on the product and those types of things. So we we work with our partners to to make sure that they really understand the fundamentals of that.

Some of our partners really know the carousel product well and can pretty much manage the whole network for a customer if they needed to and understand how to troubleshoot BrightSign. So depending on the partner, we just walk alongside them and make sure that they have all the tools they need to support their customer well. If their customer is still struggling, they can escalate through our team or the BrightSign team, and we'll get we've had plenty of times where, there was a locker room example. Like, I showed that locker room one earlier.

They were trying to do something kinda wild and out of scope really for both of our products. I'm not promoting that, but there was something kinda wild that wasn't really related to our two products, but we worked out and figured out where it was actually a network issue. It was a I think I believe it was a networking time out issue, for example, where packets weren't getting delivered or some nerdy technical thing. But what will happen is we will work with the partner to get logs or those types of things, carousel, BrightSign, and the partner will connect to solve the customer's problem.

That's how we typically work together because you have to have a great experience. Like, for us Yeah. We're a annual subscription product. If you don't have a great experience with us, you're probably not gonna you're not gonna probably renew with Carousel.

Right? And we like BrightSign, so we wanna make sure that everybody's happy. That's kinda how we work together. Tim, if you wanna add to that.

And and to and to piggyback on that, I would say from the implementation side, BrightSign offers, you know, the ability to load carousel software onto our players before they ship out. So just to to kinda streamline the installation process, someone doesn't have to know how to hook up a BrightSign necessarily or how to program carousel or things like that. They can plug in power, plug in network. The the player downloads the, carousel packet, and and away you go. So that kind of installation, you know, ease of use goes a long way as well. Save some money and time.

Excellent.

Saw that survey come up as well. Oh, okay.

Anything else?

Just got another one. What trends are you seeing from schools or universities that are driving new signage needs?

Tim, you wanna pick that one, or you want me Yeah.

You know, depending on the campuses, I mean, I've noticed in in again, just from what I've seen at the at the schools my, my kids go to, you know, there are some there's a lot more video walls, a lot more, you know, wow kind of factor. When you're in the student center, there'll be a big video wall showing, you know, highlights of the the football game from last weekend or, you know, environmental views of what the campus looks like for incoming students and things like that, during the seasons. You know, here's what fall, winter, spring looks like. And that's, you know, the and you're seeing that everywhere.

Right? Not only in campuses. You see it a lot in airports and shopping centers, areas, things like that. That's that's interesting.

You're you know, wayfinding, can be, very helpful as well. We're starting to see that pop up.

You know, I'm not sure, Eric, if, you know Yeah. I would say side of the safety side.

You know?

Yeah. All all the things that Tim mentioned, I would say that the conversations that that schools seem to perk up around the most to me are around admissions and residence life.

Yep.

And so if you think about just thematically, we're seeing schools' enrollment is down at a lot of schools. And and there's a smaller population, and they want they want campus visits to be really, really good experience. And so how do we make sure that if prospective students are coming in to experience campus, that is definitely a thing where signage is helpful. And so here's all of our corporate partners.

Here's what we do to help students get jobs after they leave school. Here's what a vibrant campus life is like. So I think around admissions and prospective students seems to be definitely because there's a clear ROI associated with it, that's really important. And then I would say in residence life, there seems to be a lot of interest around how again, back to the engagement piece and kids thriving on campus.

It can't just be common area signs.

And that's a very important part of the strategy, but it's also gotta be in stairwells, and it needs to be in residence life, and it needs to be in the athletics area. And and so kids are getting consistent messaging. And so I think those are probably the two for me that that I would suggest. So Alright, Mitch. Anything else?

Looks to be that's it.

Okay. Well, thank you all so much for the time. Tim, thank you for joining us. This is Yeah.

Thank you for having me. This has been great.

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