Corporate Digital Bulletin Boards: Benefits & Best Practices
In today’s fast-paced environment, you need to be able to communicate with your staff rapidly, regardless of where they are located. Digital bulletin boards offer a dynamic and engaging way to handle internal messaging across all of your corporate locations. They also make a great first impression on visitors.
Installing virtual bulletin boards across all of your campuses keeps your entire team on the same page through seamless company updates, HR memos, and more. Learn how digital bulletin boards work and some of the best practices for using them in a corporate setting.
What are Digital Bulletin Boards?
A digital bulletin board is a form of digital signage that is displayed prominently in an office to share important information in reception areas, conference rooms, and common areas.
In the workplace, these digital bulletin boards often display internal communications and announcements, including schedule changes and upcoming events. They may also display more general information, such as weather and local news. Some companies even feature posts from their social media pages to build a cohesive and engaging brand through internal messaging.
Types of Corporate Digital Bulletin Boards
There are a few different types of digital message boards that are often used for corporate communications. Many offices employ more than one type of digital bulletin board for more cohesive messaging.
Building Lobby and Entrance Signage
These corporate bulletin boards are large LED displays placed directly in your lobby and other high-traffic areas. You can also place these bulletin boards outside the entrance to your office. LED displays are designed to be viewed at a longer range, which means they work very well in large lobbies and in outdoor spaces.
If you’re looking to make a big impact with your corporate branding and messaging, this is a great way to do it. These boards serve as a bold first impression for new visitors. They’re also a very effective way to communicate announcements with your team.
Break Room and Elevator Digital Signage
These smaller LCD displays are another effective way to communicate with your employees quickly and directly. They’re versatile and work well for sharing a variety of different types of content.
Not only can you share internal news and messaging that wouldn’t be appropriate for an entrance space, but you can also share social media posts and other entertaining content to add to the atmosphere of your office. When selecting displays for your break room and elevator boards, be sure to opt for screens with a small pixel pitch and clear resolution that are easy to read at close range.
Reception Area Digital Message Boards
Using digital bulletin boards in your reception area is another effective way to make a great first impression. Like break room signage, these are LCD displays that are easy to read at close range.
These bulletin boards are a particularly effective way to welcome guests for appointments and direct them to the appropriate offices. Many organizations also use them to display information about local weather, traffic, and news.
Benefits of Using Virtual Bulletin Boards
There are plenty of benefits to using virtual bulletin boards across your organization. They’re an effective way to save time and communicate more efficiently, particularly for multi-campus corporate offices. Some of the benefits of using digital bulletin boards include:
- Centralized communication: Digital bulletin boards serve as a centralized platform for corporate leadership to communicate with their employees across multiple locations. This eliminates the need for separate communication channels, which can be difficult to manage and coordinate, and often result in confusing mixed messaging.
- Exciting branding opportunities: Switching to a digital bulletin board is also a great way to build your brand image. You’ll have better control over your internal messaging and can share content that is relevant to your current marketing strategy. Cloud-based signage ensures cohesive messaging across multiple office locations. This is particularly important as many companies move back into the office – your digital signage can enhance your environment and contribute to a positive company culture.
- Better engagement: Digital bulletin boards will also help you increase engagement among your team members. Studies have shown that digital signage has a recall rate of 83% and captures more than 400% more views than static displays, which is what makes them so effective for sharing information about upcoming events, policies, and news.
- More efficient: While digital bulletin boards do require an investment up front, they ultimately save time, effort, and money in the long run. This is because it makes your internal communications much faster and more efficient. You’ll be able to broadcast messages to your entire company in seconds, reducing back-and-forth between teams at different locations.
- Flexibility: Digital bulletin boards are easy to customize, so each of your individual office locations or even individual departments can adjust them to meet their specific needs. ComQi’s OnSite digital signage content management system empowers local staff to create and post hyper-localized content within the EnGage platform.
- HR messaging: Human resources departments often struggle to share information with their entire organization quickly. Digital bulletin boards ensure that everyone receives the same information in a timely manner.
How to Plan For and Implement Digital Bulletin Boards
To successfully implement digital bulletin boards across all of your offices, you’ll need to have a plan in place. Here’s what to consider when planning for digital bulletin boards.
- Identify your goals. What do you hope to accomplish by implementing digital signage in the workplace? Do you want to increase engagement, make communication more efficient, or even make your workplace more fun? Answering these questions will help you create a game plan for your digital bulletin board implementation.
- Assess your hardware and software requirements. Once you’ve decided what type of digital bulletin boards you want to use, make sure that your offices have the technology to handle them. Determine what type of hardware will work best for your needs, as well as what type of content management software you’ll need to create and distribute content for your bulletin board.
- Choose a vendor. The next step is to select the digital signage vendor you want to work with. Choosing a vendor is about more than just the quality of the sign itself – you’ll also want to seek a company that can help you with installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting when necessary. It’s important to choose a vendor like ComQi that offers comprehensive support and training, as well as regular software updates and security patches to keep things running smoothly.
- Develop a content strategy. Before you start implementing your digital bulletin boards, you’ll need to decide what types of content you want to display and how that will correlate with your existing internal messaging.
- Test and evaluate your signage. Before deploying signage across your organization, test it out with a bulletin board in one high-traffic location to see how it performs. Use this information to tweak your implementation strategy as needed.
How to Customize Content for Virtual Bulletin Boards
Putting together a content strategy is one of the most important parts of implementing virtual bulletin boards in your organization. The content you post on the bulletin board should be relevant, timely, and engaging for everyone in your office.
There are many different types of content that work well on a digital bulletin board. Many companies use digital bulletin boards to share important announcements like events, schedule changes, or HR policies. However, you can make your virtual bulletin boards even more engaging by using multimedia such as images, videos, and animations.
Your digital bulletin boards need to stay current with what’s happening in your organization, so look for a software program that allows you to update them in real time. Additionally, you may want to customize content for offices in different locations.
The best way to stay on top of your content strategy is to use a CMS designed for seamless remote management, such as ComQi’s EnGage. With EnGage, you’ll be able to design compelling content for your bulletin boards in a user-friendly interface and update it with just a few clicks.
Best Practices for Using Digital Bulletin Boards
Once you’ve got your corporate digital signage up and running, here are some best practices to follow to keep things running smoothly.
- Keep messaging consistent. You’ll want to make sure that both your imagery and your messaging aligns with your brand to maximize its impact.
- Make your content easy to read. Avoid posting content that is too cluttered or overwhelming. If it’s difficult to read or understand, your employees will walk past the board without absorbing the information. Keep the posts organized and avoid imagery that distracts from the message at hand. Ultimately, your content needs to be both visually appealing and informative to make an impact.
- Localize your content. Each of your office locations has a different internal culture. You’ll want to make sure that the content you’re putting out is relevant to each specific location, rather than sharing generic information across your entire company. ComQI’s EnGage tool makes it easy for local staff to create and post content that’s relevant to their office.
- Provide appropriate training and support. It’s important that the employees using the digital bulletin boards on a day-to-day basis receive appropriate training. In addition to in-person onboarding and troubleshooting options, you should also provide an in-depth user manual for your team to refer back to.
Measure the Effectiveness of Your Virtual Bulletin Board
After implementing your digital bulletin boards, you can track performance to ensure they are effective. Set measurable goals and KPIs to follow and assess over time.
Two popular KPIs to track for digital bulletin boards are impressions and dwell time. Impressions are the number of people who see your bulletin board, while dwell time is the average amount of time they spend looking at it. If you’re using an interactive bulletin board, you can opt to track engagement metrics as well.
Encourage all of your employees to provide feedback about the bulletin boards using internal surveys and polls. Since employees interact with your boards every day, their input is very valuable and serves as its own KPI. By tracking all of this information, you’ll be able to make informed decisions to improve your content.
Streamline Communications With Corporate Digital Signage
If you’re struggling to communicate efficiently with your employees, now’s the time to upgrade to a digital bulletin board system. Digital bulletin boards serve as an information hub for your employees and offer a hassle-free way to keep them updated.
ComQi is here to help you implement digital bulletin boards and more corporate digital signage across your organization. We offer industry-leading cloud-based signage solutions that are scalable, flexible, and cost-effective. Get in touch today to learn more.