Led by Strategic Communications, this initiative creates a more unified, efficient, and accessible way for departments to share and manage content—while maintaining the flexibility for local storytelling and messaging.
By using a centralized platform (Poppulo), UVM is reducing barriers to sharing content, decreasing communication clutter and improving how important information reaches students, faculty, staff, and visitors across campus in strategic and intentional ways.
Submit Content to Digital Signs
Internal Communications provides support and resources for distributing digital content campus-wide. Our goal is to help campus partners increase awareness and engagement about UVM initiatives and opportunities by leveraging our digital signage central digital signage system. Submit content
Join Digital Signage System
Interested in having a digital sign for your area? Joining UVM’s digital signage solution, Poppulo, is quick and easy—working to standardize ordering hardware, installation of devices, and onboarding to the platform.Complete a Digital Signage Interest form
Sharing Content
How it Works
UVM’s digital signage platform blends centralized coordination with distributed participation across campus.
- Content Submission
Campus partners can submit content through a centralized form. Submit the form at least 2 weeks prior to your event or content expiration date. Review content guidelines below for appropriate submissions. - Review and Scheduling
Content is reviewed to ensure alignment with university priorities, brand standards, and accessibility requirements. - Distribution
Content is scheduled and distributed to relevant screens—either campus-wide or targeted to specific locations depending on their audience(s). - Local Contribution
Units on this central system can also manage their own content for screens within their spaces independently of campus-wide messaging.
Content Guidelines
To maximize impact, digital signage content should be clear, concise, and visually engaging.
Best practices:
- Provide 1920x1080px (Landscape) PNG or JPG
- Keep messaging brief (30–40 words or fewer)
- Focus on key details: what, when, where
- Design for quick readability (think billboard-style)
- Use high-contrast, accessible visuals
- Videos should be 1min or less, and are required to have open captions.
All content must follow UVM brand and accessibility standards.
Content that is not appropriate for digital signage may include commercial advertising, personal messages, or materials unrelated to the university.
Adding a Digital Sign for your Unit
What is Poppulo?
Poppulo is the platform that powers screens across campus as a part of UVM’s centralized digital signage platform.
It provides a single, cloud-based dashboard where teams can create, schedule, and publish messaging to specific locations or campus-wide. Content can be planned in advance, updated instantly, or pulled from live sources to display current news, events, and information from a variety of systems and platforms—all without the need to visit or physically update individual screens.
With built-in scheduling, targeting, and performance insights, Poppulo helps ensure messaging is timely, coordinated, and effective across the university.
Benefits of Participating
Digital signage is a powerful communication tool that complements email, websites, and social media by delivering highly visible, real-time messaging in physical campus spaces.
Key benefits include:
- Clearer Pathways – instead of finding and engaging with multiple separate processes, you’ll be able to submit campus-wide through a central intake process managed by the Internal Communications team.
- Real-time campus communication – utilizing live data from events calendars, news stories, and more; information on the screen is always current and applicable
- Reduced reliance on printed materials – Reduces overall cost, production time, and sustainability impact.
- Improved consistency and brand alignment – the use of centrally designed and branded templates ensures everything is on-brand.
- Enhanced campus experience and engagement – visitors will benefit from getting targeted content that is relevant and applicable to them; and learn to expect it from digital screens around campus.
- Campus-wide collaboration with Unit-level autonomy – units can control their own local content, schedules, and priorities while plugging into wider campus initiatives.
CATalert Integration
A benefit to UVM’s digital signage network is that it is already integrated with the university’s campus-wide emergency communication system (CATAlert) — enabling immediate, highly visible alerts and emergency messaging across screens in high-traffic areas.
In the event of an emergency, authorized from the Division of Safety and Compliance can deploy campus-wide takeovers, ensuring critical safety information reaches the community quickly and clearly—no need for individual units to do anything.
Pricing
Joining the central digital signage system has annual software costs (Poppulo license and Cloud Access), and one-time hardware costs (flatscreen, thin client, etc). Below is the breakdown of these costs and commitments.
In joining the digital signage system, units agree to a participate for the full term of the contract.
Software Pricing
| Time Period | Per Contributor License | Per Device (Screen) License |
|---|---|---|
| July 1, 2026 - December 31, 2026 (6 months) | $79.77 | $278.27 |
| January 1, 2027 - June 30, 2027 (6 months) | (pending) | (pending) |
| July 1, 2027 - June 30, 2028 (1 year) | (pending) | (pending) |
Hardware Pricing
| Components | One-time Purchase (Update as needed) |
|---|---|
| Screen | |
| Thin Client |