SITUATION

A large K12 district located 90 minutes north of New York City is committed to creating an engaging, relevant, and active learning environment for all students. To help attain this goal, the district sought to employ digital signage displays across its three elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school.

The school district’s previous on-premises-based digital signage solution failed to meet its need, as it was challenging for new users to learn, and increasingly expensive to maintain. The IT director communicated to the Carousel team that their ideal digital signage solution needed to be user-friendly, scalable, and extremely easy to learn, run, and manage. With these attributes in place, staff new to digital signage could effortlessly keep messaging fresh and relevant for its roughly 3,000 students and 400 faculty and staff members. It also had to provide a rich toolset for designing, creating, and distributing informative, eye-catching channels for everyone, as well as displays tailored to the interest to various audience segments.

SOLUTION

With the successful rollout of its first 15 Carousel Cloud licenses, the district determined that this cloud-based digital signage content management platform met and exceeded its needs and expectations. It has since taken advantage of Carousel Cloud’s efficiency and scalability to further scale its licenses to over 300, with plans for more.

Several factors make Carousel Cloud’s comprehensive, end-to-end workflow the ideal foundation to build on now and into the future. First, there was no longer a requirement to integrate individual devices with each display for playback. Carousel Cloud works with industry-leading partners to enable an easy, often zero-touch experience when scaling up and managing the districtwide displays. That includes Apple TV devices, which the district had already integrated with their displays.

Carousel Cloud’s compatibility with Jamf Pro, a cloud-based mobile device management (MDM) solution, offers a special advantage to the district and its IT department. With Jamf Pro, the district’s digital signage administrators can remotely and securely monitor, control, and manage their Apple TV devices as individual units or groups of devices across its schools. With more than 2000 Mac Books and 3,000 iPads in use at its facilities, Carousel Cloud’s strong partnership with Jamf Pro, and compatibility within the Apple ecosystem, “has made the transition to Carousel Cloud as seamless as possible.”

BENEFITS

Carousel Cloud empowers users to develop and distribute digital signage in the most intuitive, agile, and versatile way. After the district received individualized help and support from the Carousel Cloud creative team to setup the look and formatting of its digital signage channels, it’s been up and running on its own steam.

The district’s IT director shares that “once you gain an understanding of the design and the way Carousel functions, it is very easy for end users to be able to move forward with it on their own.” While he was solely in charge of creating content at the outset, this responsibility is now shared by roughly 20 other staff members. The solution’s intuitive user interface and ease of use made it virtually effortless to train others. Users can quickly learn how to “copy any content to any channel with minimal time and effort,” and easily create new channels across the district.  

Another benefit to Carousel Cloud is its support for emergency Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) messaging, which is distributed districtwide. The IT director adds that they “feel comfortable knowing that Carousel accepts CAP messaging and will convert all our digital signs over to a lockdown screen in the event of an emergency.”

Administrators manage several channels, including a main channel that everyone can see, as well as ones run by specific departments, such as guidance counseling, athletics, club specific news, and STEM initiatives. They can utilize centralized templates, content, and brand elements or upload new media assets. Newly created channels can be reviewed and approved by school officials prior to distribution.

Considered a channel, each on-screen display can be organized into zones or sections to separate different types of information, such as news, video, photos, and text. Carousel Cloud’s support for RSS feeds enable real-time data, such as weather stats and sports scores, to populate the displays automatically.

Carousel Cloud, in summary, has substantially enhanced the school district’s communications strategy and digital media capabilities. “Communication is very important to us, and we can update things very easily in a digital manner, rather than posting static printouts on a bulletin board. The dynamic content that we can create with this solution is much timelier and more effective.”

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