Digital Signage Alerts: CAP Explained

By definition, a crisis is an unexpected and detrimental situation or event. A thorough crisis communications plan that includes digital signage alerts can play a significant role by transforming the unexpected into the anticipated, and clarifying how to respond accordingly.

Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is a simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is responsible for the CAP standard.

CAP allows a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems, thus increasing warning effectiveness while simplifying the warning task. It also facilitates the detection of emerging patterns in local warnings of various kinds, such as might indicate an undetected hazard or hostile act.

CAP provides a template for effective warning messages based on best practices identified in academic research and real-world experience. This is what most campuses will use to actually deliver emergency announcements, and one method you can use to send digital signage alerts to screens.

Visix’s Alert Notification module allows for manual alert overrides using the software interface and provides multiple ways for integrated third-party systems to automatically trigger your alert notices – by posting CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) messages to the content manager, sending emails to the content manager, or by communicating with the available API. These external systems can include mass notification and text messaging services, emergency notification systems, public address systems, and others.

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