Is your digital signage of value to employees?

A recent guest on our Best Practice webinar series was the insightful Chuck Gose. He’s a high profile expert in the world of internal communications - and in particular around the digital signage channel.

In the webinar, Chuck shared insight, best practice tips, and case studies showing attendees how they could fairly easily increase the effectiveness of digital signage inside their own organization.

According to the State of the Sector 2015 survey, 50% of global companies use digital signage to enhance employee communications. But to get the best value from this channel’s strengths, it’s important to have a strategy.

Of course insight and measurement are key to the success of any channel. Chuck specifically addressed ideas for measuring success:

1. Benchmark against company Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Measure what will be meaningful to your stakeholders. Do this by using the same KPIs and reporting format used by senior leaders and other departments in your company. Then select metrics that measure the success of your digital communications based on those KPIs.

2. Gather and use employee feedback

Employee feedback is probably one of the biggest sources for measuring your success when it comes to Digital Signage. Use individual and focus group feedback, collect anecdotal comments and stories.

Remember that you’re not only collecting for calculation of ROI but also to make sure you’re doing things right for employees.

• Ask employees what they want to see more of?
• What do they want to see less of?
• What did they like, what did they remember?

Those sort of questions are really helpful to guide you. It’s not that you have to do everything based on what that feedback is given - but it can guide you going forward in improving engagement.

3. Add interactivity where you can

Smartphones and tablets have encouraged people to use touch screens. Interactive digital signage is the future. Right now, it is more commonly seen in the consumer world, but we’re seeing an uptake in interactive touch screens in the workplace. It works very well in seeking to engage offline/disconnected workers. Rather than rely on them to remember to go to their smartphone - have a touch screen right there where they can get access to company information, which can also be customized to content relevant to their location in the organization. You can also feature checklists, promotions, company information and social events.

The key is it can become a two-way channel. You can ask for employee feedback on specific content by including a button to give feedback on something they read. It’s important to remember interactivity doesn’t have to relate to just content, but can relate to direct action. We know the value employee recognition brings to employee engagement; you could ask for an employee to enter a colleague’s name to nominate them for a company recognition program.

What’s really of value here is you now have metrics from this interactivity - page interactions, employee reactions, content popularity (e.g. what content are they touching). No different from how people might track website or intranet traffic. What path did people follow, how long did they stay on screen, that’s really valuable data for communicators to have when calculating their ROI.

4. Ideas for Calls to Action (CTA)

After you inform them, you most likely want them to take an action. How do you do this with the digital signage channel?

• The URL is most likely too long. Arrange the use of a URL shortener
• Set up a contact person
• Phone number to call
• Use SMS, and have them text to a certain number to get more information

If you have smartphone enabled employees, another choice is BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). Not so common in IC, it’s already used in the retail world. If you have a smartphone enabled workforce, they can receive the information on their smartphones that is being shown on the screen, based on proximity and where they’re located. Content can be delivered to each employee based on location.

All of these suggested CTAs will give you measurement, which will help you assess engagement.

Watch the on demand webinar with Chuck Gose “Digital Signage – 7 ways to increase your impact and reach” click here