Clear messages are more important than ever. Digital signage can greatly improve your communication and help your congregation to navigate in your church. You can communicate safety expectations, guidelines, information on where things are, what’s new, what has changed.
6 Ways to Improve Communication via Digital Signage
1. Keep your content up to date.
Using digital signage you can remotely update, schedule your contents, so your messages, events information, will never be out of date. Even when there’s last minute changes, you can keep them updated with ease.
With COVID-19 still lurking, safety procedures, guidelines may be required to change often based on your local government guidelines. Use of digital signs can make this process much easier.
You can also plan and schedule your content out so you don’t have to be around the day of events just to update some signs.
With simple, cost effect devices like Amazon FIre Stick or Raspberry Pi, you can turn any TV into digital signs.
2. Collaborate with others to update your signs.
Almost any digital signage solution can helps you do #1, but more often than not, your signs are the collaboration results of multiple people. If you are the one who’s responsible for setting up the systems, training everyone, provisioning access, password, this task can be daunting. On the other hand, from the content collaborator point of view, no-one wants to learn a whole new system, remember more passwords just to edit a few slides.
There’s a few simple solutions for that:
Google Slides: it is already a common slides creation tool and many people already know how to use it. For those who never use it, they may be already familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint, and Google Slides is pretty similar. And even if you never use it before, the tool is very easy to pick up.
With Google Slides, your slides store on the cloud, multiple people can access, edit it at the same time. The slides are already in a format that perfectly fits for TV screens. So for collaborating on your digital signage it is a great tool.
For digital signage admin, you just need to put the Google Slides on to you signs, when changes are made on Google Slides, your signs will be automatically updated. You can also mix Google Slides with your other normal image, video, social media content in your playlist.
This way, your content collaborator can contribute to the slides design without having to log in or learn another tool.
Dropbox, Google Drives, OneDrive: Sometimes Google Slides is not the ideal solution because your sign is in a spot with flaky WiFi connection, or you need a simple way for people to share a bunch of photos quickly. In this case, Dropbox, Google Drives, OneDrive would be a great solution. Most people already have one and are familiar with using them. You can create a shared folder, share it with your collaborator. They can just put in images, photos, PDF documents that they want to share, and the content will be displayed on your screens. Unlike Google Slides, the files will be stored locally on the players so if you lose internet connection the content will still be playing.
