Automatically Greet Office Visitors With No-Code Digital Signage

One of the most valuable leads your sales team has ever landed is coming to your office. She walks through the door, toward your receptionist, and sees a screen on the wall with a personalized welcome message. Your signage shows her that she's not a run-of-the-mill visitor. She's announcement worthy. 

There are off-the-shelf solutions for automatically greeting visitors on an office screen. But why pay for another app that you could easily build yourself? All you need is a web form, a basic database app like Airtable, and ScreenCloud. Any time the appointment form is filled out, the details get added to the database, which reformats it into a professional-looking greeting. And since ScreenCloud lets you put almost any information on any screen, you’re all set.

It’s not just about a warm welcome, either. Maybe your visitor is meeting with the sales team, but when someone from the C-suite sees the welcome message, they decide to pop by for a hello. It’s just one of many internal communication strategies for turning your operation into a well-oiled machine. Here’s how to set it up, even without a technical background.

Step 1: Create a no-code visitor management app

The first thing to do is to create the framework for your visitor management app in a database. We recommend starting with Airtable's Visitor Management System Template. Airtable sits somewhere between spreadsheets and enterprise database apps. For this use case, we’re most interested in its Views, which let you turn rows of data into something that looks more like your Netflix or Spotify home screen. Only instead of displaying movie and playlist recommendations, it shows information about who’s visiting your office.

The template already includes a few columns, but you might want to add your own. For example, to add a field for visitor photos, right-click any of the columns and select Insert Left or Insert Right. Name the new column Photo and choose the Attachment field type. 

One of the other things that makes Airtable better than a spreadsheet is Linked fields. You can see this at work in the template’s Visiting column, which only accepts values that exist inside the Employees table. That prevents an empty or incorrect cell from causing confusion when someone shows up for their meeting. Now, let’s set up the form to gather that information.

Step 2: Sync visitor appointment information to your app

Form apps are a dime a dozen. But one that stands out is Fillout, which lets you pull data from Airtable to make dynamic forms. We’ll use this integration to create a “Who is the appointment with?” question in a form feel more like a search bar than a multiple choice. 

Create a free account, click + New form, and choose the Connect option to set up your Airtable integration. Then, Fillout will give you a handful of theme options and ask for access to your visitor management database. In the last step of the Airtable connection, make sure to select your Visitors table from the Table dropdown. 

With your form synced to your database, all of your column headers are automatically converted into pre-written questions in the left pane. For example, drag ‘Reason for visit’ onto the form canvas, and you’ll see Fillout pulls the Business and Personal choice options from Airtable. Insert the Visiting question, click +Add, and you’ll see a list of people from your Employees table as question answers.

If visitors are the only people submitting the form, the columns from the template might be all you need. Or you could add a few personal touches. Imagine structuring the form so that either visitors or your staff could fill it out and adding a conditional field for ‘Welcome message’ that only your employees can respond to. Airtable and ScreenCloud should be able to make just about anything you dream up look great on your signage.

Step 3: Turning form submissions into a gallery view

There are a few reasons to choose the visitor management app over ScreenCloud’s built-in calendar integrations. Connecting Outlook to the front desk screen will show meeting names, dates, times, and descriptions but not much else. Airtable, on the other hand, lets you create detailed, personalized cards for each row of data. 

To see what we mean, click Gallery in the left pane of your Visitors table. This will turn each row from the Grid view into a card. You can pick and choose which fields are included in cards from the Customize cards dropdown. And let’s say that you did include that Welcome message field in your form. You’d probably want to open the Filter menu and add an ‘is not empty…’ condition.

Play with the settings until your cards show exactly what you want. Consider experimenting with other views and table options as well. You might prefer a calendar view that displays image attachments. Or you could open the Calendar view’s Share view window to get a link that adds appointments to third-party apps like Outlook or Google Calendar. It’s the card view that we think really shines, though, so let’s connect that to your screens next.

Step 4: Add your visitor management app view to ScreenCloud

Between Airtable’s embed options and ScreenCloud’s Embed App, this is the easiest part of the setup. From your Gallery view, click Share view button (a few spots to the right of Customize cards) followed by Embed this view. That will open a new window with the iframe code, an option to hide view controls, and a preview of what it’ll look like. Copy all the text under < > Embed code and open ScreenCloud in a new tab.

Open the Apps directory from your ScreenCloud dashboard and search for Embed App. After creating a new instance, all you need to do is paste Airtable’s embed code into the first textbox and play with the Zoom factor until the sizing looks right. Click Save & Close and your visitor management app is ready for any of your fullscreen playlists or channels. And it’s 90% of the way there if you want to show cards in a smaller sidebar zone.

Step 5: Display visitor details in a sidebar (optional)

With ScreenCloud Channels, you can create zones that display media, apps, and playlists independently of each other. Maybe you want a scrolling ticker across the bottom of the screen, some Google Slides playing a main view zone, and a sidebar for visitor announcements in the right third of your signage. Setting it up is a piece of cake:

1. Open the Channel tab from your ScreenCloud dashboard
2. Click New Channel
3. Give it a name
4. Choose the screen orientation
5. Hit the Edit Layout button
6. Select the screen layout you want
7. Use the dropdown menu to cycle between zones and add content

There is one hiccup with the sidebar option: multiple cards. Depending on the size of your screen or how many fields are included on each card, they might get cut off along the bottom of the zone. You can get around this by replacing the Embed App with the Page Scroll app in your sidebar. Since the Page Scroll app uses URLs instead of iframes, only copy the text in Airtable’s embed code between the quotes that come after `src=`. That should show the same content and add an automatic scroll that returns to the top of the page after clearing the bottom.

There are even more ways to connect ScreenCloud and Airtable so you can build customized solutions for your internal communication and employee engagement initiatives. Throw a form app into the mix, and your options are practically limitless.

A good place for inspiration is the HR & Recruiting templates. Pick one, connect it to an existing spreadsheet, form, or calendar, and you can create dynamic, engaging content for everything from new hire updates to vacation calendar views to gamified team training boards. 

Experiment with different types of interactive displays on ScreenCloud signage

So-called no-code apps like Airtable, Notion, and Coda let people without technical expertise build powerful software experiences. They’re often interactive, created with touchscreens and mobile device hardware in mind. But with ScreenCloud, you can create professional, high-quality visuals to display virtually any data you collect and store. 

ScreenCloud is built for tinkerers of all ability levels. Start small with an automation for updating digital signage with Siri or jump right into the deep end with GraphQL queries and mutations. Get together with the IT person in your office or the HR team and put together a list of things you’d love to display on digital signage. Then grab a free 14-day trial to see how you like it.