Digital signage rarely runs itself. Behind every screen that stays fresh, on-brand, and useful, there is a team of digital signage managers making decisions about strategy, content, and access. In a small deployment, one person might wear every hat. In a distributed network across a campus, hospital, or corporate portfolio, that job splits across several roles, each with its own skills and responsibilities.
This guide brings together everything a digital signage manager needs to build a sustainable program: the core roles your team requires, why you need a dedicated digital signage champion to drive strategy, the case for democratizing who gets to contribute content, and a ten-step framework for writing policies that keep your content management system (CMS) running smoothly.
What Is a Digital Signage Manager?
A digital signage manager is anyone with ownership over part of your system, whether that is the hardware and network, the content strategy, the screen designs, or the day-to-day messages. In a simple setup, you may have just one person managing your digital signs. More often, a distributed network requires several people to take ownership, set policies, and maintain the system together, each accountable for a different piece of the puzzle.
Understanding who does what, and why, is the first step toward a digital signage program that stays organized, on-brand, and genuinely useful to your audience as it scales.
Key Digital Signage Manager Roles: Who Does What
Here are the roles and requirements that come up most often across digital signage deployments, from the person who installs the system to the people who click publish.
Technical Manager
This is often the person who purchased the system, so they already have a working plan in place. The Technical Manager is usually someone from your IT department, and they’re responsible for implementation, licensing, system security, and technical and network issues. Since the Technical Manager implements your system and data integrations, they will set up your software and hardware default settings from the start, and handle software and hardware updates over the life of your system.
Content Manager
This person is often responsible for employee or student communications, marketing, or public relations, and drives your overall communications strategy. The Content Manager should determine the overall look of your screens, the content displayed, and what goes where on each display layout. They also need to define naming conventions for the various parts of the system, such as layouts, playlists, players, and tickers, and assign user roles and privileges.
Layout and Template Designers
Your Content Manager can stipulate logos, color schemes, fonts, and other elements that need to remain consistent, and Layout and Template Designers bring those ideas to life. Message templates are standard designs that limit what Content Creators can alter, usually a predetermined background, title, and font style, much like a blank form. This protects your branding and saves your Content Creators time, since they only have to write their text, and maybe add an image, before their message is ready to go. Layouts are the placement of items on the screen, such as blocks for messages, tickers, and date and time, framed to match your standardized look. Layout Designers create these to ensure you always have a good mix of content on your displays.
Asset Designers
An asset is simply any image, video, PowerPoint, or other file type brought into your digital signage system. Asset Designers are your creative team, sometimes students, often a graphic design or marketing department, who use third-party software such as Photoshop or PowerPoint to create digital communications.
Content Creators
The beauty of a distributed content management system is that you can invite many different people to submit digital signage content. Content Creators usually have permission only to create messages within your software or templates, though in some cases you may also want to give them rights to import other types of assets.
Template Users
Template User is the most basic role for a digital signage system. These users can only submit messages that they create within your fill-in-the-blank message templates, which is a quick, easy way to let less experienced communicators or designers contribute to your communications.
Content Approvers
Content Approvers can be department heads, lead designers, or your Content Manager. They review anything submitted by Content Creators and Template Users and confirm that messages are accurate and appropriate before they go live. Getting new approvers, creators, and designers up to speed quickly is easier with structured software training built around your specific roles and permissions.
Organizing Roles with Organizations and Suborganizations
As your team and role list grow, most digital signage software platforms let you create organizations and suborganizations that mirror your actual organizational hierarchy, whether that means splitting access by location, department, campus, or another segment entirely. Each organization or suborganization can have its own Content Managers, Content Creators, Approvers, and template libraries, so a regional office, a specific building, or a single department can manage its own screens without touching content that belongs to another group.
This structure keeps permissions clean as you scale. A Technical Manager or Administrator can still oversee the system as a whole, while individual suborganizations stay self-sufficient, publishing and approving their own content within the boundaries you set. It also makes onboarding easier, since new Content Creators or Template Users only need to learn the piece of the system that applies to their organization or suborganization, not the entire network.
Why Every Organization Needs a Digital Signage Champion
Most digital signage systems are researched and purchased by an IT administrator, which makes sense since it starts as an infrastructure and networking decision. However, once it is installed, it stops being purely a facility issue and becomes a communications issue. Most organizations assign content tasks to their marketing, communications, or HR departments, and some schools allow student groups and department heads to contribute. But who pulls it all together to make sure the right content reaches the right people? Every organization needs a digital signage champion.
A digital signage champion is someone who thinks strategically rather than tactically. They look at the system as an opportunity rather than a challenge, and they assemble people from your various teams to examine audience preferences, traffic patterns, and content ideas, so you can build campaigns that appear on the right screens at the right time. This is usually your system Administrator or Content Manager.
What a Digital Signage Champion Does
- Promotes digital signage internally, so more employees get involved in content creation
- Educates staff on your communication goals, specific to digital signage
- Explains user roles and responsibilities, so everyone knows what is expected of them
- Outlines brand and content standards, so your screens always look their best
- Encourages best practices for content, workflows, and publishing
- Trains staff on calls to action, so every message prompts your audience to act
- Tracks ROI, and continually improves workflows and content strategies
How a Champion Elevates Your Digital Signage ROI
In some cases, your champion also works with the CMS vendor to keep staff current on the latest tools and tricks. Having one person stay on top of software update features, new publishing options, and the latest design trends lessens the burden on your overall staff and gives you an in-house expert in digital communications. When your champion succeeds internally, your screens will show it, audiences will appreciate it, and they will engage with your communications.
Democratize Your Communications: Why Multiple Contributors Matter
When we talk about democratizing communications, we mean getting more people involved in the process, rather than relying on the old-fashioned approach of a single communications department pushing out one-way messages. Communications perceived as top-down are not as effective as those seen as a conversation where more people can contribute. With digital signage, intranets, and social tools like wikis and blogs, organizations have made huge strides in democratizing how they communicate. Anyone who is part of a community can post news and share best practices, and when more people become involved, they’re more likely to get the story straight and share it with others.
The Business Case for Democratized Communications
A study by Watson Wyatt confirmed that effective communication is a leading indicator of an organization’s financial performance, employee satisfaction, and turnover. It found that firms who communicate effectively are nearly five times more likely to report high levels of employee engagement, and 20 percent more likely to report lower turnover. Choosing a web-based or networked digital signage solution where many people can create and post messages tends to produce better results in understanding, branding, and sharing across the organization.
Benefits of an Inclusive Content Strategy
- Inclusive: open messaging software gets more people involved in the process. This does not mean you cannot put gatekeepers in place; it provides an easily monitored platform for your community that gives you feedback on whether your communications are working.
- Reinforcing: different people take in information in different ways, and presenting ideas visually reinforces the printed, email, or web-based communications you publish elsewhere.
- Unifying: digital signage provides an environment where branded templates and presentation styles can be predetermined, so everyone shares ideas within your brand standards and reinforces them.
How to Create Digital Signage Policies: 10 Steps
Publishing policies for your digital signage can streamline workflows and improve your content whenever more than one person creates it. Policies also make people self-sufficient, so they don’t take up your valuable time asking the same questions again and again. Here are ten basic steps for creating digital signage policies.
1. Discuss Appropriate and Inappropriate Content
Decide whether you have any prohibitions regarding images, language, or topics, and whether you need to comply with FCC or other regulations. Give clear guidelines for what is and is not an appropriate message, which will save hassle, embarrassment, and even liability.
2. Include Identity Guidelines for Fonts, Colors, and Logos
List any specific fonts, colors, and logos you use to create a cohesive look. This is especially important when you have created branded layouts or templates.
3. Give Some Basic Design Tips
Not everyone is a trained designer, so helpful tips for creating messages can go a long way toward making your content look better.
4. Outline Acceptable File Formats
Decide whether you prefer imported graphics to be JPEGs, whether people can import audio or video files, or whether content should be created in PowerPoint and then imported. Make sure you cover all file types your audience might want to use.
5. 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 their message to get published. If they have to sign up for an account, explain how, and be sure to detail all types of users and roles in your policies.
6. Explain Distribution Channels and Endpoints
Explain the basic publishing flow of your digital signage. Some playlists may go out to all displays, while others feed single screens, intranets, or collaboration apps. Content Creators need to know where their message will show up so they can design with that placement in mind.
7. Publish Browser Requirements and IT Security Policies
Depending on your network and software, you may need a particular version of a browser to avoid problems. Have your IT staff spell out any security or firewall policies that might affect your system.
8. Include User Names and Passwords
You may not want to publish approver credentials, but make sure to document at least your default login in your policies. The last thing you want is breaking news that cannot go out because someone has forgotten their password.
9. Provide Contact Information for Questions
Hopefully your policies are clear enough that users will not have many questions, but things can get hectic and unpredictable. Tell your users who they can contact, and how, if they have questions or problems.
10. Publish Your Policies
Put your policies somewhere people can easily access them, such as an internal website. People often remember things visually, so consider including screenshots of forms, templates, or the software interface. The main thing is that your policies stay clear and concise while still containing all the information your users might need.
Best Practices for Managing Your Digital Signage Team
Strong roles, a dedicated champion, an inclusive contributor base, and written policies work together, not in isolation. A few practices help tie them together:
- Pair every new role, from Content Creator to Approver, with hands-on onboarding so permissions and expectations are clear from day one.
- Revisit your policies at least once a year, since distribution channels, endpoints, and staff turnover change faster than most written guidelines.
- Give your champion visibility into analytics and ROI so strategy decisions are based on what audiences actually engage with, not guesswork.
- Keep templates and layouts locked down for brand consistency, while leaving room for Content Creators to move quickly on timely messages.
For a fast, practical refresher your whole team can listen to in one sitting, check out our podcast episode, 10 Quick Digital Signage Tips for CMS Managers, which covers actionable advice for anyone managing a content management system day to day.
Final Thoughts
A digital signage program succeeds when the right roles, a dedicated champion, an inclusive group of contributors, and clear policies all work together. Start by mapping who owns each responsibility on your team, then formalize how they collaborate.