Higher Education Campus Preparedness Webinar

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SUMMARY

This webinar discusses the use of digital signage in higher education, focusing on cost-effective scaling, accessibility compliance by 2027, and emergency messaging strategies. Carousel's experts share insights on unified CMS benefits, supporting various hardware, and integrating with existing tools. They also cover ADA Title II compliance, the importance of visual alerts during emergencies, and features like full-screen alerts and multi-layered messaging.

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome, everybody.

We're just going to wait a few seconds here as kind of people are popping into the webinar.

Hopefully everyone is having a great day.

All right. So let's get started. Welcome. This is our higher education campus preparedness webinar. I hope that everyone's start of the school year is going really well.

I am JJ Parker. I am the CEO of Carousel, and I'm joined by Scott Swanson and John Skoy who are in our customer team. And we're just gonna talk a little bit about what we're seeing for digital signage on campuses. So couple of things we're gonna talk about is, you know, obviously cost effectively scaling your signage network, leveraging the things you have. Scott's got a lot of insight. He works with a lot of our customers that are deploying signage in all sorts of different ways, so we'll hear from him.

I'm gonna talk about the 2027 accessibility stuff. I know title two is something that's probably top of mind for everybody. I just wanna share our viewpoint on it, where where Carousel sits and what things you should consider in your signage network.

And then we're gonna talk about messaging with with John. He again works with a lot of our customers, making sure that their emergency communication plans and setups are correct and effective.

And then we'd love to hear from you.

Any questions you have for us, please pop them in the chat that's on on the right side as we go through the presentation.

Whatever questions you might have, just pop them in there and we'll we'll go grab them all at the end.

A little bit about Carousel. We've been in digital signage for a long time.

I actually started Carousel back in 1997, not dating myself, but before digital signage was a word. So, you know, lots of experience in signage, lots of deployed screens, very proud about our customer base and supporting our customer base for a very long time, very large footprint in The US and Canada.

So again, what the things we think about when we think about how digital signage is applied in education environments is like, how are we reaching these students? There's lots of things going on on the campuses, people moving every which direction and how are we actually engaging with the students? And we like to think about like, we like to communicate to people in the places that they are, As the student population is moving through the campus, they might be in the dorms, they might be in the classrooms, they might be in the unions, they might be out on the lawn on their phone. So we like to have a conversation about where are you seeing and how are you currently reaching students and how can we be a part of that initiative for you?

Yeah. And I'll thanks, JJ.

So research shows that about 87 of universities use digital signage to improve communication campus wide.

It's part of the strategy to communicate with students. However, a lot of universities that come to us or that I work with and my team works with, they have a very fragmented signage deployment. So different departments, different sub colleges, different solutions in each one of those. Some might have the same, some are kind of piecemealed together. It's a little bit messy.

It's not unified. From an IT perspective, it's a bit of a bear to manage.

And so it does take time and energy to consolidate everything into one solution, but most of the customers that we work with, really by the time we get fully deployed around campus, they just have nothing but good things to say about the benefits and that it was worth the project. So there's a few things that we see, kind of big things. One is that a unified CMS makes training your staff simpler. So we have John Skoy runs Essentials webinars where people can join and get the basics of Carousel bimonthly. We have our self guided Carousel Academy, which is video training that anyone who has access to Carousel can utilize. And then just the questions that come in, they're all catered to one CMS, which makes it a lot easier to get staff onboarded and trained.

Also having visibility into all of the different devices that you might have. We'll talk a little bit more about devices here in a minute. But having that all in one place makes it much easier to troubleshoot and see the overall state of your signage system. There are different tools that you use to kind of deploy these different hardwares, but having a place where you can see them all, whether they're connected to the account, you can check their status and things like that, having that all in one place makes it a lot easier.

And then emergency alerting, which John Skoy is gonna talk about here in a little bit. It's far more effective and simple if there's one solution controlling those screens in the event of you need to take over those screens.

Imagine in this picture, there's several Carousel logos around here. Imagine if you have just two of those spots with signage or on one solution, and then they're kind of different solutions all around. In the event when something happens and you need to take those all over, imagine having it in all of those spaces in one spot managed by one thing.

So those are some of the benefits there. The one thing that a little bit doesn't get talked about as often is just different content, having different departments kind of have a unified feel to each building around campus. You walk into one building, it's got your colors, it's got a layout on there, it has a general feel to it, and it really creates a lot of cohesive, unified feel across the entire campus. So signage creates ambiance in a space. It really does. And so when you walk into one building and if it's really disjointed across different buildings, across different departments, you really don't feel this cohesiveness across campus. So that's another added benefit of kind of consolidating that.

And one of the biggest challenges with customers that we work with on the college campus side isn't necessarily the programming or the events or the athletic things or classes. A lot of those things are kind of firing. It's really about getting communicating to those students about all of these things.

It's engaging those students in a meaningful way and allowing them to feel like they belong or that they are informed around campus that they know what's happening around them.

Some organizations use printed flyers, and that can be effective.

It can be an effective way of getting that out there. There's printing costs, obviously, the lack of editability if something needs to change. And not to mention, I just spoke to a university recently who does a lot of print stuff, and they mentioned that a lot of them just end up kind of scattered around campus in trees and in bushes, and then a lot of them just end up in the wastebaskets anyway. So a lot of waste.

So signage can really help with that.

And I also spoke to a large university recently who, they were doing some renovations in some of their key areas and some of their crucial signage devices were offline for an extended period of time as they did renovations. And during that time, they had a noticeable drop in engagement in events around campus. So signage had become a really a key and essential part of the university communication ecosystem there.

And then just getting students engaged and people around campus, your staff, visitors, people engaged with it can be a challenge as well. And I have a really good example of this one housing unit at university.

The admin of that building decided to start a Pet of the Month initiative, asked the students that were living there to submit pictures of their pets, and everyone loves their pets.

They had so many submissions, they had to change it to a Pet of the Week initiative there. So when students feel pride about what's up on the screen, they're gonna engage with the rest of the content. They're going to see what's up there, and the communication to those students becomes far simpler.

So you might feel like, you know, great, Scott, this cell phone's really cool, but the cost of buying all the new hardware to match a new CMS, all of that is just, it's not feasible to really bring everything into one solution. So Carousel does, speaking for us, we do support a ton of hardware.

Apple TV, Amazon Sign to Stick, BrightSign, Windows, Sony Philips, we have a lot of dedicated media players that we support, and you can find those on our webpage.

But just about any hardware with a web browser and internet connection can connect to Carousel in one of our express feeds. So it's kind of a lighter weight player, kind of this one to many strategy there. So chances are you might not even need new hardware anyways. We can use and leverage what you already have in place.

And in the same realm, when it comes to people using the tools, we support and integrate with a lot of the tools that your users are already using to create graphics or creating content, and it's just a matter of how do we distribute that through Carousel. So not a ton of changes from that. You don't have to do everything within Carousel. A lot of times we will integrate with something that you're already using, and then it just becomes, hey, the less time you spend in Carousel, the better.

You can just go ahead and use your tools, and then it's just gonna automatically populate right up there in Carousel. So I've been working in signage for almost fifteen years. I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of universities, from small deployments to large deployments, to multi state campus stuff.

All of what I just mentioned in the last couple of minutes are really just things that have really contributed to a successful communication strategy across campuses using digital signage. So thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Scott. I love that Pet of the Week's like the universal content that everyone Yes.

We see so many schools and companies that have Pet of the Week.

Yeah. It's simple, but it's very effective.

All right. So let's talk about compliance. Probably everybody's very favorite topic to talk about.

But let's talk about I wanna talk about digital accessibility. It's it's a pretty hot topic. I'm sure a lot of you, if not directly, just have been working on things like the ADA Title II stuff, PDF remediation, all that. But I just kinda wanna level set some of that so everyone so we're all on the same page and then talk about specifically, like, how we see the digital accessibility stuff in signage. So first, just to level set things, I like to talk about the curb cut effect. I don't know if anyone's heard of that.

But when first learned about this curb cut effect, thought, what a great analogy for for what we're trying to do.

The so back in Roman times, when we first made roads, they had curbs and they were mostly to keep the mud out like in the street and out everywhere else. Right. So you got a road, you had a curb and it was like a water and mud control system.

And when I was thinking about curbs and specifically the little ramps that curbs have today, I basically grew up in a world where there was always a little ramp on the sidewalk.

But it wasn't until recently that I started researching this and learned that the first cut in the curb for a ramp wasn't until 1945.

And it didn't really become a law in The United States until 1990, which I was like, wait, that is fairly recently.

So the idea of the curb cut is that, you know, we decided to put a cut in the curb so people with wheelchairs could get off the sidewalk across the street and back up onto the sidewalk. Very specific for a specific demographic of people. But what it turned out is that the cut in the curb and the little ramp was actually useful for everybody. It was useful for people with strollers, delivery people with carts, people with canes.

Maybe in 2026 people looking at their phone blindly walking across the street.

So the curb cut effect is this idea that we made an accessibility device for a specific demographic, but it was actually good for all of us. And that's kind of like the frame I like to take with the the current digital accessibility initiatives that we are all trying to become compliant with.

So next. So obviously, ADA has a new ruling for a title two that says that we have to be compliant by 2027.

Actually we'll flip to the next slide because this is like acronym soup for me. When we first started talking about this stuff, I'm like, there are so many acronyms flying around. It's hard to even understand how these things connect. So ADA, American with Disabilities Act, we've all heard of it.

The initial wave of it was obviously for the physical spaces like we need ramps and elevators and things of that nature. And then that was like in the 90s.

And then in the early 2000s and mid 2000s, we started applying the Americans with Disabilities Act to the digital world that we had started creating.

The Department of Justice, the DOJ, that's the, you know, one that can make rulings on what these things mean and how we apply them.

The Department of Justice did make a ruling around Title II, which is the part of the ADA that applies to public entities that says that our digital stuff needs to comply with the WCAG 2.1 AA standard.

The WCAG two is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

That was created in the early two thousands.

And so basically, the Department of Justice has said you have to comply, your digital world needs to comply with this web content accessibility guideline standard by April 2027.

The way that we prove that we are compliant with that is through a VPAT, which is a voluntary product accessibility template. So there's a template, there's tests.

It tests things like keyboard navigation, contrast, you know, a whole variety of different things.

Once you check the list on all of that, that generates an accessibility compliance report that you could hand to somebody and say, look at my website, my application, my whatever is compliant with the ADA title too. So that's a lot of explaining. Hopefully, that's helpful. I know it took me a while to wrap my brain around all this stuff.

But the gist is public entities, including universities need to be compliant with the WCAG 2.1 double a standards by early next year. So So there's two parts of things that that I wanna talk about is that there for digital signage, there is the consumer side, you know, which Scott talked a lot about. That's the viewer, right?

The people who are seeing and interacting with the content, they're going through our spaces, seeing the signage. And then the other side of it is the admin side. So that's like the carousel software itself.

There has been a little confusion around, does the admin content management software need to be WCAG compliant?

Our frame is yes. Yes. It does.

The there are there are rulings out there that that says, like, your, you know, your employees or your volunteers or your students or whoever is using the the CMS software falls under the Americans with Disability Act.

Thus, the software that they interact with has to be compliant. So there's the admin side or the CMS side. And then there's the viewer side or the consumer side. So it's like the sign on the wall.

This one is a little less straightforward because digital signage is inherently a visual medium.

It's a lot like all the other signs you have on your campus.

And if you can't see that sign either it's too far away, the font's too small, the contrast isn't right, or you literally can't see it, it's hard to interact with. And so how do we deal with digital signage when it's a visual medium?

And the ruling and kind of like the letter there is that the content that's on there has to be accessible in another medium, right, in a ADA compliant medium. And that's why at Carousel, we have what we call the accessibility site, which is a web page that's got the same content, your content that's on your signs, can be viewed on your mobile device, and you can use a screen reader or you can use the assistive technology on that device to consume the same information that is on the sign. So when thinking about the viewer side, just know that the the rule basically states, like, you have to provide the same information.

It does not necessarily need to be in the exact same format. It just needs to be the same information in another medium, like a mobile device or a text only format. So I know that's a lot. I'd love if there's other questions that you could pop those in the chat there.

So alright. Let's move on to emergency messaging with John.

Hey, everyone. I was actually looking forward to speaking on this today as someone who came from a higher education background. I was there for almost a decade and a half.

It's something that came up. It's a necessity to have emergency messaging in place at any higher education institution. But in one example of a place that I worked, they actually had digital signage in a lot of the common areas. But I always noticed that whenever emergency alert alarms would go off, it wasn't tied to the signage in any way, you just hear an alarm. And this, in my opinion, is an incomplete usage of the tools that you are already utilizing. So I like to begin with some statistics, because who doesn't love numbers?

First one is fifteen percent of adults have trouble hearing this kind of speaks to what JJ was talking about with accessibility. If you have hearing impaired people and an alarm is going off, it's not going to help in any way. So you need to be able to reach your whole audience on campus.

Another interesting fact is that people who get both audio and visual alerts will respond 32% faster. I don't know how they got the exact 32%. But I've seen that firsthand. And it goes with the third statistic where forty percent of alert failures happen because alarms aren't heard.

But also, I've been in situations, as I'm sure many people have, where you've been in an office setting and you'll hear an alarm go off and everybody will kind of look around like, is that a drill? Did it go off on accident? And everybody will just kind of sit around wondering what what's going on here.

Now amplify that by a bunch of first year freshman students who aren't used to like, you know, testing of alarms or anything. And you could have people doing a whole lot of nothing when there could be an actual emergency. So that's why it's so crucial to have a visual that's telling people exactly what's going on and what to do in a timely manner so that people can get to where they need to be.

And one way to do it with digital signage is, a feature that we have, which is full screen alerts where you can easily go into the software, click on a specific zone, and just publish a template takes about five seconds. And this will push out an alert to all of the screens that are playing that channel. You can also have it integrated with a cap system if you have one, where if an alert emergency alert goes off, you can simply press a button on your phone or have it tied to an automatic system with like a national weather service type thing. And it will push out that alert to everyone.

And it will override all channels, get the alert out to all people that need to see it. And it can even integrate with things like airplay interrupts so that if you have smart boards in the classroom or in the conference rooms, it can override those two so that everybody knows, okay, this is a fire drill, or this is an actual tornado warning, and they have directions right on the screen wherever they are, how to respond. And that way you can really expedite the emergency process. Very important to have, I mentioned cap and being able to integrate it with Carousel.

We integrate with all the major ones single wire crisis go raptor so that these can easily be coded into Carousel with some some simple copy paste. And that way all of your emergency alerts can be tied to actual bulletins that already exist.

And it's super simple to get it all tied together into one system. Another cool feature and important feature, and this actually goes all the way back to something Scott mentioned, where you may have different content playing in different buildings or different areas of your campus. And if you have maybe an alert that just needs to go out to the residence halls, or just the student union, you could push a full screen alert that is playing on just those channels in those regions to that. But then if you have a more global alert, like, you know, a tornado alert for your entire campus, you could actually have two layers of alerts in your signage so that the lowest level is just going to be for that channel in that building.

And then the next level is going to be a campus wide alert channel. And every anytime you put anything on that channel, it broadly distributes it to every single sign that's on in your system. And those that way you can get the message to exactly the area you want when you want it there.

And this really breaks down into the four layers of messaging that you need for, you know, emergency messaging and higher education. And first is prevention where you can just send out normal messaging throughout the day, this is what to do in case of an emergency, you can just have those bulletins running. And then you can have disaster preparedness where you're sending out, you know, drills and warnings and things. And then finally, if when something invariably does happen, you'll be ready with those response emergency alerts that you can push out to exactly the screens that you need to push them to. And when things are over, instead of just turning off an alarm, you can actually send out separate messaging to recover people say alert has passed everyone go back to your normal business.

And all this while you are communicating to your entire population and getting people coordinated for what they need to do in case of an emergency. So I guess in a nutshell, that's why it's really important to utilize signage that's already displaying to your benefit whenever there's an emergency.

And that's that's what I got to say about that. Thanks for asking.

I love it's so awesome that you guys have such a deep experience, not only just in digital signage, being here at Carousel for a really long time, but even in your past roles to be able to speak firsthand on how this stuff works.

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