Goodwin College: Setting the Pace

“We had just moved the college into a brand new building and wanted to come up with a clean and efficient way of communicating messages internally to students, faculty, and staff,” says Caleb Prue, Senior Graphic Designer at Goodwin College in East Hartford, CT.

The nonprofit four-year school had relocated to a former brownfield site on the Connecticut River, removing 30 oil storage tanks and remediating the soil with the help of the town of East Hartford and state agencies; a project that has won them numerous accolades and prizes, including “Brownfield Project of the Year” by the Northeastern Economic Developers Association.

“Digital signage offered many benefits,” continues Prue, “including reducing the amount of physical resources used, like paper and toner, while increasing the speed at which we can post messages.” After trying out another system, they went with AxisTV digital signage software.

“Before we bought our Visix system, we had a similar online service purchased on a subscription basis via a third-party vendor. It offered many advantages, but was sometimes difficult to manage because there were several layers separating us from the actual service,” says Prue. “Now, our entire AxisTV system is housed downstairs, and we have total control over it.”

The ability to get the message out quickly was a major deciding factor for Goodwin. “Typically when we receive a request to post an announcement, it comes in to the Communications Department by email, where it’s then assigned to our graphic designer, and she’s able to create and schedule the posting within a few hours of the request coming in.”

Sami Binette is the lead graphic designer and primary user of AxisTV at Goodwin. She tells us, “Overall my experience with the system has been delightful. The interface is very easy to navigate and use. It’s simple to schedule items and not hard to go back and re-schedule or edit existing messages. Everything happens in real time; there is no lag from when you upload an item to when it appears on the screens, which is great.”

Digital signage also offers many improvements over traditional communication channels. “The ability to produce vivid and dynamic animated content allows more flexibility to engage our audience visually than we can with printed material,” says Prue. “Also, because we can schedule content on the displays, we ensure that outdated postings come down immediately after they expire, reducing clutter.”

Prue and his team push content out to a large display at the main entrance, another large display in the student lounge and five smaller displays outside elevators in the main building. “We have lots of information about campus activities, academic deadlines, weather forecasts, and so on, as well as fun content like ‘On This Day In History’ or ‘Fun Facts’,” Prue says. “Many campus visitors have commented that it’s a very dynamic and engaging way to communicate messages, and several have inquired about where we purchased our setup.”

The main audience for their content, however, is their over 3,000 students. What have their comments been? “Sometimes it’s the fact that they don’t make comments. Frequently, when I’m near one of the displays at the elevators, I’ll see a group of students just standing there silently staring up at it, captivated by the content on the screen. It makes me smile every time I see it.”

Prue concludes, “The ease of use and control we have over the system, combined with the speed at which messages can be displayed, makes AxisTV a tremendous solution for digital signage.”