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Newsletter Archives
 By publishing some
standardized policies about how to create, manage and deliver your
visual communications, you can streamline workflows and improve your
messages’ content and look. In addition to telling people how to go
about creating and posting messages, you can also avoid cluttered
playlists and ensure that the look of all of your content meets your
standards. Policies are also useful because people can be self-sufficient in
this process and not take up valuable staff time asking the same
questions again and again.
Consider these policy
tips:
Discuss appropriate
and inappropriate content
Consider who your
audience is and what sorts of messages you want going out to them. Many
users prohibit commercial content and only want postings that are
relevant to their organization. Do you have any prohibitions regarding
images, language or topics? Do you have to comply with FCC or other
regulations? Give some guidelines on what is and is not an appropriate
message – this will save you hassle and embarrassment.
Include identity guidelines for fonts, colors and logos
You may want to have
more control over your AxisTV content. Establish your organization’s
identity with specific fonts, colors and logos. This standardizes all of
your messages and creates a cohesive look to all content. You could also
create templates with specific backgrounds for maximum cohesion.
Give some basic
design tips (contrast, colors, etc.)
Your messages may have
good information but if they don’t look good, no one will stop and read
them. Not everyone is a designer, so some helpful tips for creating
bulletins can go a long way towards making your content pleasing to the
eye and easy to read. Generally, high contrast works best – light
backgrounds with dark letters or vice versa. You want messages to be
eye-catching but also readable, even from a distance. What sizes of font
would be best for the displays? If audio is being used, what sort of
physical space is the display in and what sort of sounds will be heard
but not overpowering? For more design tips,
click here.
Outline acceptable
file formats to be imported
Do you want all
submissions to be .jpegs? What other sort of image files can be
imported? Do you want content created in PowerPoint® and then
imported? Do audio files need to be .mp3s?
Clearly define the
submission and approval process
Let people know who is
authorized to submit content, who approves that content and how long it
will take for a message to be posted to the system. If they must sign up
to an account before submitting content, how do they do that? How long
will messages stay in the playlist? Are there any policies about special
or custom backgrounds?
Explain distribution
channels and display options
It might be helpful to
explain how you have configured your AxisTV system. Some playlists may
go out to displays, or to displays in certain areas. Others might send
to mobile phones as text messages. Content creators need to know where
their message will be received and in what form so they can create
effective communications.
Publish browser requirements
Visix software is
web-based but, depending on which version of AxisTV you are running, you
may need a particular version of a browser to avoid any problems.
Include user names
and passwords
You may have set up
different levels of authority in your system – administrators can
approve and publish content and users who can only create and submit
content to the administrators. How does each level log into the system?
Provide contact
information for questions
Hopefully, your policies
are clear enough that users will not have any questions but things can
sometimes get hectic and unpredictable. Tell your users who they can
contact, and when, if they have questions or problems.
These are just some of
the things you can include in your policies. You can write your policies
as a bullet list, a Q&A format or simply as a series of short
paragraphs. Publish your policies in print form or on the web, if you
have an intranet with easy access for all users. People often remember
things visually, so you may also want to include screenshots of forms,
templates or even the AxisTV interface itself. Making your published
policies available as a downloadable PDF or Word document may also be
useful.
The main thing is that
your policies should be clear and concise yet contain all the
information someone needs to deliver and manage content in a way
consistent with the needs and guidelines of your organization.
To see sample Visix
client policies, visit
www.visixforum.com
Copyright 2008. Visix, Inc. All rights reserved.
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