September 07, 2011

Digital Screens Feedback and Suggestions

The response to the new digital screens has been overwhelmingly positive. And we’ve also received some great feedback and questions that have led to some changes we’ll be making and some best practices guidelines. Best Practices Summary Summaries are required to get your event on the digital screens, don’t forget them. Major Events Big, all-day or multi-day events are best promoted by a page or pages which summarize the (often annual…

By David McKelvey

The response to the new digital screens has been overwhelmingly positive. And we’ve also received some great feedback and questions that have led to some changes we’ll be making and some best practices guidelines.

Best Practices

  1. Summary
    Summaries are required to get your event on the digital screens, don’t forget them.
  2. Major Events
    Big, all-day or multi-day events are best promoted by a page or pages which summarize the (often annual) event from a high-level, but then utilize LiveWhale events for the actual sessions.
  3. External Advertising
    At least one external, commercial organization has already asked to put several events on the screens. Direct advertising by an external organization is not an approved usage of the screens, since the event would also appear on the website and that impacts our .edu domain. (It’s a long story, it’s just something you don’t do on a .edu.)However, if a student group, department, program or office sees value in an event (particularly one held on campus) and wants to promote it to their members/school, then they may by posting it to their website and consequently the screens as well. (They then become the sponsor.) Please note: you may not accept gifts, cash or any other favors for promoting an external event. The event should be of value to your members or the school at large.

Roadmap Additions

  1. Institutional Directional Tags
    Institutional offices have the ability to post to all screens and that is sometimes not of value — messages are sometimes directed at a certain school only. I will be added soem special tags for the institutional offices to use to direct their content only to selected schools to facilitate this.
  2. Long-term Multi-day Events
    Some organizations, like the Hoffman Gallery have long-term events like art shows. For events like this, I will be dropping the farther out from now events in the channels to allow more differentiated events to appear. In other words, you’ll still see that the Hoffman Gallery is open today, tomorrow and the next day, but not events for all of next week, etc.

There is no estimated time for these to be included in the system since there are a bunch of home page changes afoot, but I’ll get them in as soon as I can.