The role of digital signage in crisis communication

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Friday, April 3, 2009
Every corporate communications department has (or at least should have) a crisis communication plan. For those who have gone through various business continuity exercises or emergency drills, you now how important these plans are.

And when I talk to customers, they ask me about how to incorporate their digital signage network into the crisis planning. My answer is simple. Do it on the front end. A plan is only as good as the people who know about it and are prepared to execute it.

If a plan exists and no one knows about it or isn't aware of what steps should be taken, then it will be chaos when put into action.

I think the major strength of digital signage in crisis planning is on the training side. Create messages for various scenarios or did-you-knows so that your workforce is prepared should a real crisis hit.

Digital signage and crisis communicationI've been through my fair share of drills throughout my career. Tornadoes. Exploding tanker trucks. Fuel spills. I've seen them all. And yes, if there's some sort of evacuation as part of the plan, digital signage can only tell your employees to get out.

But if it's a "seek shelter" message, you could embed screens in those shelter areas and communicate updates to the groups held up in those designated locations. Sometimes a lack of information is worse than bad information.

With MediaTile's solution, you could preload all of your signage with a batch of pre-determined messages. The messages could be called up in an instant and delivered out to your workforce instead of someone (likely you) trying to create one on the fly while the crisis is underway.
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Photo credit, karlfrankowski


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