West Virginia University alerts tens of thousands with news of all kind with a digital signage and text message alert system.

screens). The alert display includes information about the current situation, and what actions WVU recommends that viewers (and message recipients) should take until further notice.

The security alerts go beyond just the digital signage network, notes Graham.

“WVU’s Police Department can trigger a three-pronged emergency notification, which switches the standard digital signage across our campuses into emergency notification mode, and also issues email and text-messages to people who have subscribed — currently about 11,000. Also, the alert is visible on Comcast Cable Channel 7, which is available to any of the individual television sets, currently in more than 3,600 dormitory rooms, that are connected to the campus cable television network.”

The digital signage switches to alert displays within nine seconds; the email and text messages can potentially take thirty to forty-five minutes to queue up and be sent.

Fortunately the emergency system hasn’t had much use so far.

“We have issued an average of slightly under one emergency event per year so far. Two alerts concerned robberies across the street from the campus, letting people know to stay away. One was during the August 2011 earthquake — we got hit pretty solidly with the shaking. We were able to let everybody know it was an earthquake. And last year we issued a weather alert when there we had a big snow and ice storm coming in, which shut things down.”

In addition to the primary goal of providing a security alert tool, using digital signage has had other benefits.

“This is more aesthetic-looking,” says Graham. The postings put on traditional bulletin boards at the Mountainlair Student Union were hard to control, and often unsightly, and the signage creates a cleaner, less cluttered content delivery. It also enables the university to relay non-alert information more quickly and easily, compared to the months it could take to create and issue a brochure.

For others like himself that make the IT purchasing decisions at their colleges and universities, Graham says that the dual benefits of digital signage make it easy to convince higher ups that the investment is worth the cost.

“You can use security as the deployment driver,” Graham says. “It’s not hard to sell the idea — no decision makers want to be the one who said ‘we didn’t need that,’” says Graham.  “But you get value by providing everyday information, so you get a lot of bang for the buck while addressing two needs with one solution. 99.9 percent of the time its in standard mode, but they are able to instantly switch over to alert a campus.”

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