Printed signs for one monthly building event can cost $18,600 a year

One building event, announced the old way, costs $1,550 in posters, sandwich boards, flyers and the designer's hours to lay them out. Do it every month and the bill reaches $18,600 a year. That number, drawn from a TouchSource report titled Building a Business Case for Digital Signage, is the anchor of an article by Jerry Sullivan and Brent Ward that FMJ, the International Facility Management Association's magazine, published on March 30, 2026, and that ASIS International's Security Management republished on August 14 under its critical communications coverage.

The republication matters because of who now reads it. FMJ wrote for facility managers; Security Management put the same cost case in front of security leaders who own emergency notification and mass communication inside buildings. Both audiences are being handed the same argument: a screen network is a management asset with a budget line attached, and the printing budget is where to start counting.

For the facilities director who has to defend a screen rollout to a CFO, the piece is useful mostly because it shows its arithmetic. It's also incomplete in a way worth understanding before the numbers go into a capital request.

What $1,550 per event actually buys

The TouchSource table, reproduced in both the FMJ and Security Management versions, breaks a single tenant event into four lines. A graphic designer at $150 an hour bills $675 to produce posters, letter-sized flyers and sandwich boards. Printing five posters at $95 each comes to $475, three sandwich boards at $150 each come to $450, and 50 flyers cost $25.

The design fee is the largest single line, bigger than the posters or the boards. The table lists it as $675 at a rate of $150 an hour and does not state how many hours that covers. It treats the fee as a recurring monthly cost, which is the assumption a reviewer will test first.

A building that commissions fresh creative for every event will recognize the number. A building that reuses a templated layout and swaps the date will not, and its version of the table shrinks accordingly. The honest use of this figure is as a worksheet: replace each line with what the facility actually spends and see whether the annual total lands anywhere near $18,600.

The authors add a second comparison that's harder to argue with. Replacing one tenant name on a traditional slat directory can cost $750, according to FMJ, while the same change on a digital directory costs nothing beyond the system already in place. For a multi-tenant property with regular turnover, that line alone may carry more weight with finance than the event table does.

The other half of the ledger

The FMJ piece says digital signage eliminates the need for printing. It doesn't set the screens' own recurring costs against that saving, and a budget case that only counts one side rarely survives a second meeting.

Health Facilities Management's planning guide, written by Kim Dwyer in 2017 and still the more complete cost inventory of the two, lists what a screen network costs to own. Installation construction, meaning power and data runs, whether hardwired or wireless. Hardware including monitors, mounts and the computers driving them, the content management software, maintenance packages for both hardware and software, operating system licensure, allowances for future growth, and warranties and end-of-life replacements.

None of those items appears in the $18,600 comparison. That doesn't make the printing figure wrong; it makes it a gross saving rather than a net one. The sharper question a facilities director can now ask a vendor is what the network costs per year across licenses, maintenance and replacement cycles, and whether that number sits comfortably under the printing and labor it displaces.

Health Facilities Management also notes that the budget doesn't have to live in one place. Funding can be split across departments, each maintaining its piece, or one department can own the whole thing. For operators where marketing, security and facilities each already fund their own screens, that's a governance decision to settle before the hardware order, not after.

Who runs the screens once they're up

Sullivan and Ward frame the ownership question as the third of three objections they hear, after "it's just a fancy TV" and "it's too expensive." Their answer is a single person in a single department acting as the conduit for all content, deciding how often it changes, with automation handling the schedule. The alternative they offer is giving each department control of its own portion of screen space.

The stakeholder map they sketch explains why that choice is contested. Finance wants savings, HR wants compliance messaging, EHS wants safety content, and facilities wants fewer labor hours spent taping and removing paper, according to FMJ. Everyone, the authors add, wants a building without tacked-up signs that end up unread on the floor.

They also observe that few organizations want a lobby screen to look like an endorsement of a cable news channel, which pushes the case toward owned content rather than a live feed. Owned content needs an owner.

Health Facilities Management's answer is heavier and built for a hospital. It calls for a four-part team: information services for connectivity, security access and day-to-day maintenance; marketing and communications as the content superuser enforcing brand standards; a facilities manager to pick installation locations during renovation or new construction and integrate screens with the interior design; and the vendor for installation guidance and upgrade information. One organizational leader owns the system and is the central point of contact, with scheduled team meetings to review projects and expansion plans.

The two models aren't in conflict. FMJ's single-conduit approach fits a corporate campus or a manufacturing plant where one communications function can hold the calendar. The multidisciplinary team fits an environment where the same screen serves patients, visitors and clinical staff and a wrong message carries real consequences.

Start with two screens, not two hundred

Both publications land on the same first move. FMJ recommends a pilot in a single high-traffic area, with a use case that has a clear return such as emergency alerts or shift updates. Health Facilities Management describes Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, starting with exactly two digital signs to understand how the technology would work before defining what a full system should accomplish.

At Nationwide Children's, that definition came down to reducing visual clutter, streamlining communication to different audiences and replacing paper and labor with something cheaper, according to Health Facilities Management. When the hospital brought in vendors, the deciding factors were how the software interfaced with existing information systems, the user experience and scalability. A proposal framed as cost-effective and sustainable is what won senior leadership's funding approval.

That sequence, pilot first and then priorities and then vendors, is the reverse of how many technology purchases run, and it's why the case held up. It also answers the question facility managers keep circling: what data wins budget approval. The pilot generates the facility's own data, which beats anyone's published table.

FMJ's platform criteria for that pilot are specific. The system should support remote updates, scheduling and multiple content formats, and screens should rotate through layers of content rather than sit static. A content calendar keeps information fresh and avoids screen fatigue, and the authors suggest using it for the birthdays, anniversaries and company events that would otherwise be a flyer on the wall.

On measurement, FMJ points to content views and response rates as the KPIs to track from day one. The authors also cite an Intel study finding digital signage can lift corporate engagement by as much as 59 percent, a ceiling figure rather than an average, and one a pilot can test against locally. Health Facilities Management adds a placement rule from the hospital rollout: put screens at natural pause points, near elevators for instance, where people are already standing still.

For a facilities team building a request this budget cycle, the work is now clear enough to schedule. Rebuild the TouchSource table with the building's real design and print spend, price the screen network's annual running costs from the Health Facilities Management list, and run one high-traffic pilot long enough to collect view and response data. Whether the net saving clears $18,600 is a question each building will answer differently, and the pilot is where the answer comes from.