A checklist for rolling out screens across a university campus
A campus screen rollout goes wrong when forty people can edit everything and nobody owns anything. This checklist takes you from the first building to the whole estate in five stages: map, structure, people, look and content. Tick each stage before you start the next.
Stage 1: Map the estate before you buy screens
Start with a spreadsheet, not a purchase order. List every building, then every place inside it where a screen would help: entrances, lift lobbies, seminar room doors, the student hub, the library foyer, the sports centre desk. For each one, write down who walks past it and what they need to know there.
Mapping checklist
- Every building listed, with the department or service that runs it.
- Each proposed screen tagged with its audience: students, staff, visitors or the public.
- Power and a network point confirmed at each mounting position.
- Existing TVs noted, so you reuse them before you buy new ones.
- One pilot building chosen, with a department that wants the screens.
Pick a pilot building where one administrator is keen. A willing department with four screens teaches you more in a month than a committee with forty.
Stage 2: Build the structure
Get the structure right on day one and every later decision is easier. A sensible pattern for a campus:
- One Site per building. The Site holds the address, and the weather on its Boards follows that location.
- One Channel per audience and place. "Engineering foyer", "Engineering level 2 rooms" and "Engineering staff kitchen" are three Channels, even in one building.
- Group the Channels inside large buildings. On the Professional plan, Areas (a wing, a floor) and Zones (a corridor, a room) keep a big building tidy and let you filter lists and send a Takeover to one part of it.
- Use names a stranger understands. "ENG-L2-N" means nothing to a new administrator in two years' time.
A Channel can play on as many TVs as you like, so six screens down one corridor can share one Channel. Each connected TV needs its own Player Licence.
Stage 3: Decide who edits what
This stage causes the most trouble later, so write it down. Every Channel needs a named owner: a person, not a department. The owner keeps the content current and answers when someone reports a mistake.
People checklist
- A central team (communications or estates) owns the structure, the Brands and the emergency messages.
- Each department names one owner and one deputy for its Channels.
- Student-facing notices have an agreed sign-off, above all near exam periods.
- A leaver process: when an editor leaves, someone removes their access that week.
- A short written guide: what goes on screen, how long a notice stays, who to ask.
In NowBoard, each user has a role (Owner, Admin, Manager, Editor or Viewer) and a scope level, from the whole Organisation down to one Channel. Admins can change any screen today; roles that limit a person to certain screens are coming. Until then, the written ownership list above is what keeps departments out of each other's Channels.
Stage 4: Agree the look once
Forty editors with free choice of colours produce forty looks. Set the rules once, at the centre.
- Create Brands. A Brand is a named set of logos, colours and a header layout. Make one for the university, and one per faculty or the students' union if they have their own identity. Mark the main one as Default so every new Board starts with it.
- Pick a small set of Styles. NowBoard has 10 Styles. Choose two or three for the campus and ask departments to stay inside them.
- Set type rules. A short heading, one or two lines of text, and nothing a student must read from closer than the far side of a corridor.
Stage 5: Connect the content that changes
Typed content goes stale on a campus because nobody has time to retype it. Feed the screens from the systems people already update.
- Room bookings from calendars. If a room's diary lives in Google Calendar or Microsoft 365 (Outlook), add its published iCal address as a calendar feed. NowBoard syncs it about every 15 minutes into a Room's bookings, and the door screen shows the current and next booking. If your timetabling system cannot publish an iCal address, staff type bookings by hand.
- Events by building. Add events once for the whole university. Restrict an event to one Site or Channel, or filter a Board by category or Site, so the chemistry foyer shows chemistry talks.
- News. Point a News / RSS Feed Board at the university news feed rather than retyping stories.
- Opening times. Enter the library and sports centre hours with exceptions for bank holidays and closures.
For example
For example, you could run a Now & Next Board outside each seminar room fed from that room's calendar, a Schedule Board in the foyer for the whole floor, and an Announcements Board in the staff kitchen. Three Channels, one building, and the department administrator updates none of the room bookings by hand.
After launch: the first month
Launch checklist
- Walk past every pilot screen at 9am on the first Monday and read it as a student would.
- Set display hours so each Channel sleeps overnight and wakes before the first lecture.
- Write and test emergency messages (Professional plan and higher) for each Site before term.
- Give every announcement an end date; review anything without one each Friday.
- After four weeks, ask the pilot department what they stopped updating, and fix that first.
When the pilot building runs without help, copy its structure to the next one. See university digital signage for what campuses show, and digital wayfinding for entrance screens. Costs per TV are on the pricing page, and you can book a demo to plan your own estate.
See it on your own screens
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