Jacksonville University connects with students & faculty through digital signage

Derry: Welcome to another SmartSign2Go customer story session.  Today we’re going to hear from Donna at Jacksonville University out in Florida on how they have made students feel more welcome and get the information they need through digital signage.  She has two screens, one in portrait and one in landscape, each connected to one of our Pro Players.  Let’s see what she has to say.  

Donna: Hello my name is Donna,  I’m the associate director of events and engagement at Jacksonville University. I oversee our campus visits as well as assist with our events for both undergrad and graduate students hoping to visit campus, and we also supervise our student ambassador staff.

I love when I am able to see a student that comes and visits our campus and then eventually ends up on campus being a student.  So just almost from start to finish seeing them come in either as a junior or a senior, visiting the campus getting inspired, feeling like this is the place for them.  And then eventually coming to campus and seeing them walk around in their backpack and being able to be at the start of that and creating a memorable experience, that did enough to impact that this was a place that they felt welcome is something that I find valuable.  On the other side, supervising students that give our campus tours, I get to see them oftentimes come onto our team as freshmen and so I get to see them grow into young adults and it’s a really rewarding experience to see that growth and development over time. 

The goal was to be able to have a student feel very personalized in their experience when they came to campus.  In the past we personalized signage, had a board that featured their name on it and it said where they were from and they were able to see where other students were visiting from as well,  and it had some limitations on what it was able to do and what we could display.  

In fact when I first started back in 2018, we used an old signage platform with a PowerPoint presentation and that’s what we posted. It was on a small little screen maybe about yay big and now we use a TV to be able to showcase all the different names for our students, so that way they are able to see who’s visiting where they’re from.  But that’s just one slide, so we wanted to be able to do as much as possible with signage used throughout the University, to add more photos, make it more engaging. 

 Our previous program didn’t really allow us to do that, so we found another department on our campus that used you know SmartSign2Go,  so for us that was awesome because we were able to take that info and apply it,  it’s been amazing.

We have pages that we design ahead of time on you know either in Canva or Adobe and we’re able to then just add it in. It could be fun goofy photos, graduation photos, what’s happening on campus.  I’m able to add any time that there’s an event and we just post it on there and then of course back to the very original important part for every visitor,  they get to see their name and where they’re from,  it gives us limitless options.  We also are able to play videos there which has been a nice addition.  So overall it’s been a unique portion of our visitor experience that I think all institutions are able to have.  

We still have more in mind, we actually have when it comes to our student ambassadors we’d like to feature one of the rotating pages to be like our ambassador of the week, and so it would tell you a little bit about them on the page and we’d feature that for the entire week.

We’re working on that right now actually, and then we are working with Athletics trying to have something that rotates regularly showing what athletic events are showing on campus. So when you are the Welcome Center, you try your best to be able to have overall encompassing information, not necessarily just to who’s visiting campus but also to what’s happening on campus. 

I mean a really nice feature that you guys have on there that definitely is nice for us is being able to add tables for visitor names,  because when you have numerous people coming to campus, being able to add a table on there so that way you can have one line that it says their their name, and then where they’re from and then the next line the same thing.  We have rotating pages,  six-seven-eight long sometimes,  and it’s in the order of where they’re visiting from.  It allows the students the ability to see,  “Oh I’m coming from Pennsylvania, well that’s cool there’s three other students that are coming from Pennsylvania too”.  Having that as an option even though it is a little remedial,  honestly is very helpful. 

 One of my favorite things is when I have a student, like they take a photo next to our board and they point to their name, like that’s the coolest thing for me. In fact I actually have an example,  so it was during Covid,  but I don’t know if you can,  oh it looks terrible but that’s basically what she does,  her name is on there and she’s pointing at the sign and for me, that I love.  You immediately see the impact of what it is that you wanted to achieve. For them to feel special,  that you acknowledge that they came. Their name is on that board,  you have people standing there literally pointing,  waiting for the slides to rotate to come to their page,  so always very cute. 

Another thing for us that was a positive experience,  is our last program,  it was like you had to save the file,  and then add the file to a flash drive and then add it to the TV.  For us it’s now instant gratification,  you can update it and it’s on the screen within 20 seconds.  Let’s just say that we had a student that they accidentally typed their name wrong or we did, or where they’re actually coming from,  they just moved and they want another city on there, they could mention it to us and we change it within seconds.  It definitely has created a better way to make edits quickly. We make sure that we’re still best reflecting the guests that are in the room.  

So I think one thing that is cool is we host a lot of people in our space. So having this Smart Sign they use it a lot as well so it’s not necessarily just used for admissions, we use it for other departments also when they use our space so third parties other departments on campus just being able to use that screen and be extremely versatile and user friendly is is very nice