How Bay Harbor Islands, Florida Uses Soofa Talk for Valuable Community Connection
Bay Harbor Islands is located in Southern Florida and is made up of two small areas known as the East and West islands. With a population of about 6,000 residents, Bay Harbor Islands is a tight knit and lively area. They currently have one Soofa Sign in their community, and many people have begun to notice how it works.
We spoke to Bridget Anne Morin, Director of Communications for Bay Harbor Islands, to hear more about how she uses their Soofa Sign, and how the community interacts with it.
Morin noted that, “It took a little bit of convincing,” for Bay Harbor Islands to be on board with installing a Soofa Sign. This is because some of the community’s population and council is older, so she knew there may be a potential technology divide. But now that her town has the sign, she’s been consistently posting messages, and residents are paying attention.
Morin most often uses our online platform Soofa Talk to create posts, track impressions, and change messaging. “We started using it right around election time and people actually noticed what was on there,” Morin said. That made me really happy because I would get phone calls from people saying, ‘I saw that the election is this date,’ and they would ask me questions about it.”
Morin is a true champion of Soofa Talk because she even takes the time to pre-program her messaging for the weekends. “I pre-program my Saturday and Sunday content for the police department. I try to post every few hours on Soofa Talk, and at least every night because there's something called the 9 p.m. routine that police departments are doing nationwide to try to get everyone to lock their doors at nine o'clock.” She often designs the messages on her own and programs them everyday.
She knows the community is really looking at the Soofa Sign because she noted that, “One time, I made a mistake on the Soofa Sign and someone actually called me to tell me. She's one of our people who walks around town all the time. She called me up to let me know that I had one of the dates wrong for one of the concerts. I fixed it right away, but because we are the only means of communication for people besides the code red notifications if they're not on social media, it’s cool to see they’re really paying attention to the sign.”
Morin also mentioned that, “Bay Harbor Islands is a big walking community. A lot of our residents walk around town, and some of them do it all the time. So if I'm able to reach them via the Soofa Sign, they're still gaining the advantage of things we're posting on social media.” This is an example of how important community messaging can and should be accessible to everyone. For people who don’t have social media or don’t have access to technology that allows them to see social media, having accessible messaging on their walking route makes a big difference.
In Florida, hurricane season is a big deal, which is why Morin is starting messaging early. “We want to make sure that we're reaching everyone that we can possibly reach. We're trying to make sure that people are signing up for code red, our emergency notification platform. Also, that they're aware of programs that we have like when we're giving out sandbags or anything like that. We want to make sure that we're reaching the most people, especially our elderly population that are not on social media.”
When asked about how she describes Soofa to others, she said that, “I tell people that Soofa is a programmable kiosk that's designed to display specific information for our community out in the street for people. Also, it's changeable, it's not like a billboard. We're able to change messaging constantly, and it allows us to impart greater information to the public. Overall, it's a dynamic means of advertising outdoors.”
Large and small communities like Bay Harbor Islands all have ways to benefit from technology like Soofa, that allows them to send messages to their residents at any time.
Interested in learning more about how your city can use Soofa Signs? Fill out our landowner interest form or email hi@soofadigital.com to get started.
Written by: Ally Peters
Ally is a Content Marketing Specialist at Soofa and spends her days researching and reporting on current trends in smart city infrastructure and OOH media.