Choctaw Casinos and Resorts has a large, complex operation spread over multiple properties in Oklahoma. Owned and operated by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the company is an award-winning gaming operator and a staple within the tribal casino community. The tribe is dedicated to guest satisfaction and engagement at all of its 23 locations, leading the way with technology, best-in-class services, and top-flight entertainment. To ensure its gaming floors, conference centers, hotels, and other locations exceed guest expectations, the company has utilized digital signage from Poppulo for over 5 years, now managing 350+ signs across its portfolio, with applications focused on enhancing the guest experience at its 8 standalone casino and resort properties, as well as its 15 Casino Too locations inside Travel plazas located throughout Oklahoma.

Choctaw Casinos and Resorts needed to ensure it had a cohesive digital signage strategy that could effectively deliver a mix of dynamic and static content across multiple properties, while also enabling each site to operate hundreds of screens for a variety of use cases. Additionally, the company sought a way to maximize ROI from its existing digital signage investments, plus streamline wayfinding at its flagship property in Durant, a resort that boasts over 218,844 sq ft of gaming floor and 1,616 hotel rooms.

To help with those challenges, Choctaw transitioned to the Poppulo Digital Signage Cloud in 2020. That migration from an on-premises hosting structure enabled Choctaw to streamline device and user management across its entire portfolio, positioning its properties to get more value out of its digital signs. 

In an age where changes need to be made on the fly, a cloud solution is a must!” —Hayden, Choctaw Conference AV

In 2024, to further ensure its flagship property in Durant was best positioned to succeed, Choctaw brought in Thomas A. O'Sullivan as its new Director of Marketing, and his prior experience using Poppulo’s digital signage platform proved extremely beneficial. Before joining Choctaw, Thomas had over 10 years experience using Poppulo at a variety of properties, and was able to bring in a new strategy and implement new processes to improve the use of digital signage at Choctaw—and the impact of those signs on the guest experience and the bottom line. Thomas has been instrumental in not only driving the expansion of digital signage, but also the value Choctaw gets from its signage investment.

Digital Signage Use Cases at the Durant Location

“Currently we run Poppulo for all of our digital signs on-property. We have hundreds of landscape and portrait signs we use for promotional content. But we also have signs specifically designed for our food and beverage locations, our entertainment venue, and our convention space, as well as our wayfinding and gamefinding applications,” explains Thomas. The scope of digital signage at its Durant property, and the Casino Too’s associated with it, is massive, encompassing the following applications:

The scale of what Choctaw uses digital signage for at its flagship property is impressive, but it’s the strategy behind the casino’s digital signage usage that is making a clear difference. While many of the property’s screens are designed to promote a variety of things happening on property, taking a deeper look into Choctaw’s strategy shows clear differentiation across three categories: intent-based content and scheduling, strategic alignment, and customization.

One clear example of how Choctaw uses the same set of signs to create a different experience can be found with the screens outside and inside of its 3,000-seat venue built to host live performances and events. Since the venue first opened, the property promoted events on 120+screens outside the venue’s doors, as well as the two 8K, 24ftx12ft screens that flank the stage. Today, Thomas and his team still use the signs for that purpose, but once the event is over, the content on the screens changes to promote other aspects of the property, keeping guests on-property and engaging with the casino’s many food and beverage outlets and gaming opportunities. It all comes down to intent. 

Prior to an event, the screens are used to create a sense of arrival and excitement. And after, we use our signs to keep people engaged with all the property has to offer.” —Thomas A. O'Sullivan, Director of Marketing 

Coordination between marketing, creative teams, and various other business units at the property are critical to the success of the resort. The Marketing team not only ensures that promotional content is always up-to-date and accurate, but regular bi-weekly meetings are now held to fine-tune strategies, address operational needs, and gather feedback from stakeholders. This allows the marketing team to respond swiftly to the resort’s needs, creating and deploying content to drive toward specific goals like ticket sales, food and beverage revenue numbers, and more, further positively impacting Choctaw’s bottom line.

In addition to better aligning digital signage with the casino’s goals, Thomas invested in the Communications Engagement Management (CEM) service from Poppulo, gaining a digital signage software expert to help implement and refine Choctaw’s strategy. Thomas stated, “Currently, we have a CEM for our Durant location, and through him, we’re continually improving our maps and wayfinding capabilities so guests can find their way to different games and revenue outlets more efficiently. But beyond the tactical stuff, the CEM service is also helping us onboard new folks and new properties by creating training that increases our time-to-value with new employees and locations.”

Seeing an opportunity to drive additional revenue by securing event bookings, Thomas and his team implemented a strategy for digital screen takeovers during conventions and large events. By giving clients—and perhaps more importantly, showing event planners—how easy it is to create a fully-branded takeover experience, the casino is increasing revenue through event bookings. This ability to quickly create and deploy custom branding enables Choctaw to secure more high-impact events and deliver a better event experience at the same time.

Digital signage has become a cornerstone of Choctaw Nation’s strategy to improve guest engagement and operational functionality. Under Thomas O'Sullivan's leadership, Choctaw’s digital signage strategy enhances the guest experience and delivers significant operational returns. As the Choctaw Nation continues to innovate and expand its digital signage use cases, it is setting new benchmarks for the effective use of signage in the gaming industry. The results speak for themselves, with increased guest engagement, higher operational returns, and revenue improvements.

The enhanced guest experience and strategic post-event signage led to increased dwell time and higher revenue. Thomas noted, "Due to the promotions on our screens after an event, we see an extended time on our gaming floor and increased revenue from our food and beverage operations because guests now stick around rather than making a mass exodus after a show." Additionally, adjustments to digital signage content have proven to result in tangible outcomes, such as a 25% daily increase in ticket sales for an underselling concert due to an increase of promotion on the casino’s screens. Thomas added, “We saw ticket sales stagnate at the beginning of December. We got through basically New Year's Eve knowing that we needed to keep the New Year's Eve messaging strong and then in January, increased rotation and time of play for those slides for that show. From that point we saw ticket sales increase 25% each day, which led us all the way up to a sellout event at the end of February.”

Strategic Alignment Ensures Goal Attainment

Increasing revenue from on-property outlets and services doesn’t happen by accident. Thomas realized, if aware of the property’s overall and departmental goals, digital signage could be deployed to meet revenue targets. In the same way Thomas learned about and implemented a strategy to drive ticket sales for an undersold event, his team learns about and helps drive traffic through promotion on specific screens to other departments and outlets that need a boost to hit their individual targets. These meetings serve as the place where goals are discussed and promotional plans agreed upon. Thomas and his team have helped increase ticket sales, drive traffic to outlets in need of additional revenue, and more—all in the pursuit of the casino’s revenue goals.

Thomas implemented a strategy that gives the casino the ability to customize digital signage for conventions and large events, attracting high-end corporate events and enhancing the overall reputation of Choctaw Nation properties. Large event clients are able to customize digital signage in the convention space, adding value to their events and creating a cohesive, branded experience for attendees. This helps keep high-margin event business coming back, as they are able to create a more immersive event experience. Thomas emphasizes, “For our corporate events, digital signage is often a deciding factor. Clients love the idea of taking over these giant screens and creating an amazing welcome moment for their team. It's a real wow factor that elevates their event." Given the increase in event bookings, effective wayfinding plays a significant role in helping guests find and navigate to games, on-property restaurants, and more. The implementation of new wayfinders significantly improved guest navigation and satisfaction, allowing guests to easily find their desired destinations, reducing the time spent wandering the property. 

Our wayfinders have proved to be a critical tool. The adoption rate here is substantially higher than what I've seen elsewhere. There's not a time of day where I'm out there and someone's not actively using them to navigate our property.” —Thomas A. O'Sullivan, Director of Marketing

Choctaw Casinos and Resorts use of digital signage demonstrates the transformative power of the technology and highlights how strategy can play a role in the overall success of a digital signage network. Choctaw Casino and Resort's implementation of digital signage has revolutionized their guest experience, from creating impactful first impressions to driving revenue across various venues. The Casino’s strategic use of digital displays for wayfinding, event promotion, and targeted marketing has resulted in measurable revenue improvements, and but also serves as a benchmark for how to use the technology effectively to enhance engagement, streamline operations, and ultimately boost the bottom line in the competitive casino and hospitality industry.

Gaming/Casino

Choctaw Casinos and Resorts

How a multiple-property casino operator boosts engagement & revenue with scalable digital signage

Enhancing Guest Engagement and Driving Revenue at Choctaw Casinos and Resorts 

In 2023, London Borough of Tower Hamlets embarked on a major transformation to reshape how it delivered on its top priorities, which ranged from providing homes, to accelerating education, empowering communities, and investing in public services for a clean and green future. 

It also wanted to establish itself as a Borough Council that listens to and works for everyone. The transformation program, called People First, required the changing and reshaping of roles and services within the council, leading the Internal Communications team to create and deliver a series of communications designed to:

Support employees during the transformation

Support a culture of transparency and two-way conversations

Ensure staff felt engaged in the council’s continuous improvement journey

The transformation program necessitated a communications-led culture change within the organization, with the Internal Communications team working in alignment with other key stakeholders, including the Strategy and HR teams.

Building on previous communication-led and data-supported impact in initiatives implemented through the Poppulo platform, the internal communications team sought to expand on this with new ways of reaching and engaging multiple staff audiences and stakeholders.

Poppulo really helped us expand what we were doing because we were able to show the level of two-way engagement, statistics, what’s working and what’s not working. That’s been a big part in helping us engage with our staff and improve on what we achieved previously."—

, Internal Communications Manager, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. 

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ leadership commitment to significant transformation was underpinned by an awareness of the need for culture change throughout the organization, if it were to achieve its goals.

Consequently, with hard data from Poppulo analytics proving the success of the council’s internal communications across several initiatives—from positive behavioral change to increased employee understanding of key issues—Asha and her comms team were made an integral part of the transformation program, working in tandem with the Strategy and HR teams.

Poppulo’s communication analytics have been instrumental in helping the comms team and the organization’s senior leadership understand how employees are engaging—or not engaging–at Tower Hamlets, arming the communications team with the necessary data to change the messaging for different audiences or change tactics or strategy.

An example of this in action was the employee My Annual Review program, where Asha and her team were able to analyze and compare engagement stats with completion rates, moving the dial from 25% in 2022/23 to 93% in 2023/24. This depth of knowledge as a result of quick and ready access to Poppulo analytics played a crucial role in the transformation program.

When the transformation came in, it was felt that there would be a need for a resource to really help with it and use the knowledge that our team has. And that was as a result of the impact that our communications were having. Not people just looking at something on a surface level and saying: ‘that looks great’, but by really going into our engagement statistics and showing that it’s worked and has had an impact."— Asha Isaac

For the change transformation initiative to be successful, Asha and her team introduced a suite of different methods to engage with staff, for example, online and face-to-face events, manager briefings, etc., as well as email newsletters and other digital communications.

The success of these different engagement methods has been due to the newsletter through Poppulo, to get the message out there to our employees—half of whom are online— in a really interesting and engaging way, which the platform enables us to do. Poppulo has played a major part in improving overall comms platform and especially two-way communication with our staff through the ability to comment and give feedback."—Asha Isaac

During this period of change, it was important for internal communications to ensure leaders were highly visible, approachable, and were clear and concise with their messages. Their goals for the leadership communications campaign were to:

Improve staff perception of senior leaders, including strengthening trust in leadership and enabling two-way conversations

Ensure staff are engaged in Tower Hamlets’ continuous improvement journey

Increase understanding and bring about behavior change via key messages around the importance of compliance and effective people management

Support managers during the transformation, given their essential role in managing change at a local level

To achieve these goals, the team executed a range of communications—everything from a Chief Executive Roadshow and Tea & Chat sessions with the Chief Executive to online meetings with the Corporate Management Team, and a Staff Conference and Awards ceremony.

The engagement and behavioral changes as a result of Asha and her team’s communication strategy were impressive.

The transformation program hinged on engaging people and gaining their support. Poppulo's role in our communications strategy was instrumental in making this happen."—Asha Isaac, Internal Communications Manager, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. 

There was a significant increase in attendance at existing events and an enthusiastic uptake of newly introduced events, which provided opportunities for two-way communication and promoted messages around the transformation journey.

Chief Executive Roadshow: Employee attendance doubled compared to previous years

Behavior/organizational culture change following comms campaign: 93% staff completion rate for My Annual Review staff appraisals, up 25% from previous year.

Staff Conference and Awards involvement: Biggest attendance ever, with an almost 400% increase on the previous year

Employee understanding of key issues: 84% positive feedback, showing “very good” or “good” understanding, up 38% from the previous year

In addition to the success of the transformation comms campaign, the use of Poppulo has been extended. From initially being used to create and publish a single newsletter for staff, Asha and her team have expanded how they use Poppulo to engage with Tower Hamlets councilors and members, and have also introduced three directorate newsletters.

From a platform that was initially used just for a weekly newsletter, we’ve really utilized it to engage with multiple audiences and different parts of the organization. And that’s come from other people seeing how our comms are landing, and then wanting to use Poppulo themselves. It really helps that the platform is so accessible and user-friendly.”—Asha Isaac

Government

London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Exceptional Service Starts with Exceptional Communication and London Borough Council Gets it Right. 

People-First Transformation: How London Borough of Tower Hamlets Leverages Poppulo to Drive Internal Change

National Grid is a progressive energy organization with electricity and gas operations in the UK and US. It has over 35,000 employees, almost half of whom are operational and field workers. 

The company’s field force is geographically dispersed and works in a range of different environments—from electricity pylons and wind turbines to underground tunnels and liquified natural gas depots. Most roles at its US and UK offices are now hybrid, and it also has contact centers and control room staff. 

The diverse nature of the company’s workforce across employee functions, business units, and geographies presents particular challenges for the company’s internal communications team. 

National Grid’s Colleague Communications and Engagement team is highly focused on ensuring that internal comms are aligned with company goals and deliver business outcomes. Because of this, Sally Jackson, Senior Manager, Content and Channels, and her team set out the following priorities:

Improve the colleague experience by modernizing and simplifying communication channels

Reduce communications noise and overload through comms platforms capable of delivering targeted and personalized content

Utilize advanced analytics to derive important insights into comms performance and colleague preferences and behaviors

Capitalize on these insights to ensure alignment with performance measures and business strategy

Prior to having Poppulo Harmony as its platform for company email and newsletters, the National Grid comms and engagement team could not deliver on the priorities outlined above and was, as a result, inadequately resourced to enable the company to deliver key business goals. 

Sally and her team could not target email communications effectively and lacked the data and analytics to know which communications were working and which weren’t. 

Additionally, the inability to target content for different audiences meant that people were receiving information via email not relevant to them or their roles, leading to information overload for colleagues—which often turns people off company communications instead of encouraging them to tune in. 

Getting Poppulo Harmony as their comms platform proved to be a game-changer and revolutionized National Grid’s communications.

Poppulo has changed our lives. We can get the right information to the right people when they need it, we know what’s working and what’s not, and we have the analytics to derive really important insights into the behaviors and preferences of our colleagues. — Sally Jackson, Senior Manager of Content and Channels, National Grid. 

"It also gives our business stakeholders reassurance that we are delivering the right message to the right people at the right time, has added additional rigor to processes, and enhanced the professionalism and consistency of email and newsletter communications delivered. This enables us to be far more effective in what we do and support business outcomes," said Sally.

The Poppulo Harmony platform plays an integral part in building and implementing a communication strategy based on National Grid’s overarching company strategy and performance measures to achieve company goals.

Superior communication performance insights through advanced analytics

Significant time-saving—up to 50%—in the production of quarterly reports

Increased employee engagement in company values campaigns

Greater comms relevancy with targeted, personalized content for specific employee audiences

A typical example of how Poppulo enables the National Grid internal comms team to achieve company goals is their use of the platform to promote and achieve employee engagement with newly introduced values. “These underpin how we work every day and deliver our strategy,” said Sally. 

“Over the last two years we introduced a new value and have three company values in place: Find a Better Way, Do the Right Thing, and Make it Happen. We used Poppulo Harmony to encourage colleagues to participate in the ‘living our values' peer recognition campaign and to recognize those nominated with personalized messages. We got hundreds of nominations the first year and almost 1,000 teams and individuals were recognized in the second year,” she said. 

In addition to being able to use Poppulo analytics to demonstrate reach and involvement in the campaign, Sally and her team also saw a correlated improvement in values-related questions in their engagement survey.

As a result, National Grid’s values were among the top 20 conversation topics on its social channels for a sustained period, and values-related questions recorded a 79% positive response rate in the annual survey, up 2% from the previous year.

Modernizing National Grid’s comms channels has supercharged the impact of its weekly global news roundup, with the launch of Grid:news using Poppulo Harmony targeting to create a single global newsletter with a local feel, establishing it as a key trusted source of company information for colleagues.

It is part of the global channel mix that includes its intranet, Grid:home; its leadership emails, called Grid:updates, and a number of other channels, including an internal social network, webcasts and townhalls, and a growing digital signage channel. 

The ability to segment and target Grid:news content through Poppulo Harmony for many different audiences, greatly improving relevance and reducing noise, and creating a local connection and feel for colleagues, played a critical role in establishing the channel as a trusted source of information. 

Additionally, Sally and the comms team use a “push” and “pull” comms strategy for maximum effectiveness. With “push” targeting and personalization, content is selected for specific audience groups, giving them relevant content and reducing noise.

Intranet (targeted home pages and news, menus, and page variants)

The “pull” customization has the benefit of allowing audiences to select the content that interests them. It includes:

Intranet apps and tools shortcuts on the homepage

Intranet news which can be personalized by selecting preferred topics to follow

Viva Engage communities, followers, and topics

The combined “push” and “pull” comms strategy has proved highly effective for National Grid. Personalization delivers on the desire of employees for more control over the company information they receive and the need to reduce information overload, while at the same time delivering the consumer-grade experience employees expect and demand today.

"We cannot control or prevent all the “noise”, but we can allow colleagues greater control over what they see and interact with. With Poppulo, we can help draw out the most important things for our people, and we can use the platform’s analytics to understand what they are interested in, which in turn informs our future content targeting decisions and content design," said Sally.

Poppulo Analytics: Better Insights for a More Effective Strategy and Time-Saving

Poppulo’s Advanced Analytics also plays a critical role in measuring the performance of National Grid’s strategic group-wide campaigns, with the executive leadership receiving regular performance updates throughout the year. 

Poppulo’s Advanced Analytics have been incredibly useful in helping us shape and refine our communications strategy, understand where to focus resources, and even underpin business cases we make for investment in improving our communications channels.  — Sally Jackson, Senior Manager of Content and Channels, National Grid. 

"The Advanced Analytics have saved our communications team time in analyzing channel performance and allows us to focus more on the so-what element of measurement, providing insights and recommendations that shape our communications strategy, and help the business understand where to focus resources," said Sally.

The team uses topics to measure the reach and impact of email-based communications and how they perform against each other and alongside other content and campaigns. Quantitative metrics from Poppulo and other channels are combined with data from colleague engagement surveys and focus groups to arm the comms team to make any necessary campaign adjustments to achieve company goals. 

The team also uses this data to help with business stakeholder conversations—to help build an understanding of what tactics work best for different types of content and audiences and assist with decision-making and planning.

 For example, the team has used data to demonstrate that alongside colleagues telling the business less is more, the data also confirms this, with higher volumes of content leading to lower average engagement in that content. And that Friday afternoon is generally not a good time to send company emails, even if that’s when a stakeholder has time to write a message!

"We have been working with Poppulo for a number of years now, and the comments from across our team are that the tool works really well and provides great insights into how colleagues interact with content and channels,” said Sally.

 We find the newsletter targeting allows us to bring our global and local strategy to life and balance local content and feel with a single newsletter that brings different parts of the organization together in a way we would not have been able to achieve otherwise. The advanced analytics are also a fantastic resource, and we use them to feed into our strategic reporting — Sally Jackson.

Advanced analytics has transformed National Grid’s ability to measure the performance of its communications, the time it takes to do so, and the speed at which it can then act on the insights learned. The comms team went from not being able to measure a channel, to being able to track reach but having limited time to produce reports or do anything with the data, to now being able to quickly produce reports that include insights and recommendations—and having the time to do that, and take action on those insights.

“We have cut the time in half that it takes to produce our quarterly reports, and we have increased the insights and recommendations that we include in the reports. Simplifying the creation of one quarterly dashboard saves us approximately 45 hours a year. Poppulo, as one of our key data sources, has contributed to that. Before, it would have taken us two days to pull together data across all our channels for a specific company-wide campaign and analyze it. Now, thanks to Advanced Analytics, we can do that in a few hours,” said Sally.

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