How the YMCA of Greater New York Rebuilt Its Digital Signage Strategy

The YMCA of Greater New York serves more than half a million New Yorkers every year, from one-year-olds in early childhood education to members aged 99 and beyond. Across 24 branches in the five boroughs, the YMCA offers swim, group fitness, youth programs, and community services. For many members, the YMCA isn't just a facility, it's a home away from home.

The YMCA faced a challenge familiar to any large, multi-site organization: how do you communicate consistently and clearly with members, and present one consistent brand?

The Challenge: Inconsistent branch branding and member communication

Before ScreenCloud, the YMCA relied on a digital signage system that didn't do what they needed it to do, alongside outdated flyers and posters across their branches. With so many messages going up across their locations, the messaging often conflicted.

Class times and locations weren't always clear, and group fitness schedules still lived on paper flyers, competing for attention with the flood of emails, social posts, and direct mail members already receive every week. For a team of just five regional marketing directors, there was no way to walk into any YMCA and know what a member should expect to see.

The Solution: Screen Strategist Program

After two years of using ScreenCloud to unify their communication under one platform, the YMCA was gearing up to launch a new campaign, It Starts Inside, a community-first campaign about how you can be anyone, and anything, you want to be.

It starts inside press release

The YMCA took part in ScreenCloud's Screen Strategist program to improve their account structure and content strategy, and to make sure every screen was ready to carry their new campaign consistently.

Screen Strategist is built for organizations whose accounts have grown organically over time and no longer reflect how the organization works, or whose teams are stretched too thin to manage content properly — our team fully audits the account, rebuilds the structure and content strategy, and hands it back working the way it was always intended to.

For the YMCA, that meant two goals: make communications radically more efficient, and make every screen unmistakably YMCA.

"We ourselves at the YMCA of Greater New York are going through a brand refresh. So with that, we wanted to also refresh our digital screens to get people excited about the new look and feel of the Y."
— Jennifer, YMCA of Greater New York

Here's what that looked like and what it could look like for any multi-site organization.

Step 1: The audit

ScreenCloud's team mapped every piece of content across every screen and surfaced three problems the YMCA hadn't fully seen themselves: regional managers had each built their own workaround of channels and playlists, duplicating the same content by hand up to five times over; corporate updates traveled through a slow chain that didn't always reach every site; and with no shared templates, branding varied wildly from branch to branch.

"The ScreenCloud team goes so far as to do our audit themselves. It saves us a lot of time and effort because they have the eyes to see what can be better. They look through improving its product and its digital screen assets in a different lens than we would."

— Jennifer, YMCA of Greater New York

Step 2: The rebuild

ScreenCloud restructured the account into three tiers: Corporate content now publishes once and flows directly to every screen in every branch. Regional managers post to a single regional channel that reaches every location in their region, instead of five separate playlists. And each branch keeps its own local playlist for site-specific content. Each location now has its own dedicated space, with regional managers scoped to manage only their own.

The content strategy became location-aware at the member level too: the screen at the membership desk shows different content than the screen by the pool, matched to where a member is in their facility journey — part of a deliberate effort to "retrain members' eyes" to look to the screens again.

Step 3: The brand

ScreenCloud rebuilt the account's entire look to match the YMCA's brand guidelines — branded themes, live widgets like location-based weather, and reusable templates staff build with directly in the platform, so every piece of content is on-brand by default.

"When you walk into a Y, you see the same screen that you would if you walked into a Y in Brooklyn or a Y in the Bronx. That brand unity is there."

— Jennifer, YMCA of Greater New York

Custom Group Fitness Schedules App

"The new group fitness schedules app is going to be a game-changer for our branches."

Alongside the reset, the YMCA worked with ScreenCloud's tech team on a schedules app that pulls directly from their group fitness system and displays it live on screens — showing what's coming up, what's full or cancelled, who's teaching, and classes members never knew existed.

It turns "I didn't know that class existed" into discovery, and gives the YMCA a new way to push members toward classes and sign-ups. It's now rolling out to other YMCAs nationally, based on this case study.

Members can now see at a glance:

• What classes are coming up, and where in the branch they're happening
• Which classes are full, closed, or cancelled
• Who's teaching, and how many people are taking the class
• Classes they never knew their branch offered

The Results

• Publish once, reach everywhere. A message that used to be added to five playlists by hand now goes out in a single publish, and corporate content reaches all 24 branches instantly instead of trickling through regional managers. For a five-person team, that's the same weekly job done in a fraction of the steps.
• A brand that shows up the same way, everywhere. Whether a member walks into a YMCA in Brooklyn or the Bronx, they see the same experience.
• Screens that work for the business. Screens are used to promote and actively drive members to toward classes and sign-ups they might not have known existed, with easy QR codes.
• A better member experience. Location-aware content guides members through the facility. The screen at the membership desk shows something different than the screen by the pool. It's part of a deliberate effort to retrain members to look at the screens again, instead of a static flyer wall.
• New Schedules app: makes programming visible in a way paper never could, cutting through the email, social, and direct-mail noise members face everywhere else.
• Content members actually talk about. The single biggest engagement driver? Photos of members and staff themselves, now a deliberate part of the content strategy.

Looking Ahead

The Screen Strategist rollout is being introduced in phases, starting with a pilot group of branches before expanding across the rest of the YMCA's 24 locations. But the shift is already clear: what started as a scattered mix of flyers, posters, and an outdated system is now one connected network, built to carry a single YMCA message — and ready to grow with whatever comes next.

"If you're a complex organization like the YMCA, you have a lot of messages to get out. ScreenCloud does an extraordinary job in helping you identify your goals. They don't go in with a plan and say, 'This is what's going to work' — you work in tandem with their team. They really care about your community and your clients."
— Jennifer, YMCA of Greater New York

If you're interested in rebuilding your ScreenCloud account or realigning your content strategy for your audience, contact your customer success manager to get started.