From CampusBird Blog
Let's start with a shocking statement: an interactive campus map is a great way to get the attention of students who are interested in your institution but may not be able to visit your campus. Okay, maybe that statement was not all that shocking, especially considering the fact that in a 2012 survey, 30% of students considered an interactive virtual tour to be a "must have" in their college selection process. Additionally, a separate 2012 survey found that viewing a campus map changed 33 percent of students' opinion of the campus for the better.
But to be successful, the process of creating an interactive map needs to be strategic. Rather than simply jumping in thinking it will help your institution regardless, careful planning and preparation is essential. To help you in that process and ensure that you get a map that will help promote your campus to prospective students and serve as a valuable tool to current students, here are 5 things you need to know before creating an interactive campus map.
1) Highlight Your School's Unique Selling Points
Your interactive map is a perfect tool to help highlight your campus to students considering you as an option. That means it needs to profile the best elements of your institution - the locations, programs, activities, history, surroundings, etc. that will make you stand out with students.
Do you have fantastic extracurricular activities or an amazing on-campus collection of art? Highlight them with a virtual tour, slideshow or video. How about a state-of-the-art science facility that will attract future biology students? Make sure it features prominently.
Do you have specific services or facilities that demonstrate that your institution understands and cares about the needs of all of your students, such as lactation rooms for new mothers, accessibility routes for the disabled, gender-neutral restrooms, or campus worship rooms? Add them to your map! Is there a piece of natural beauty or notable historic site or monument on-campus or nearby? The list goes on...
Knowing and highlighting the aspects that make your campus life special helps you come up with a plan on how to optimize your map.
2) Admissions or AND Marketing: Get Cross-Departmental Buy-In
While the initial plan may be for marketing and admissions to use an interactive campus map primarily for recruitment purposes, there are innumerable ways to use an interactive map, and you will not be the only office on
campus that can take advantage of these opportunities. The alumni office may use the map to create and promote a virtual tour of planned facilities to help with fundraising and constituency communication, while the athletic department will highlight its facilities for recruitment and game day promotions, directions, concessions and more. Meanwhile, facilities management pros will find that an interactive campus map equips them with a whole new toolbox, from parking to managing huge spikes in visitor traffic for special events like commencement.
3) Establish a Campus Map Development Timeline
As with any major development project, you need to go into the interactive map with a realistic timeline. Chances are you are looking to get it ready for the next recruitment cycle, but is that really realistic? How much sense does it make to roll it out during the summer, as compared to the fall semester when the campus visits start coming in?
This question will influence just how much you build out the map. A simple overlay can be done relatively quickly, but a more comprehensive, interactive feature will take longer to develop. The CampusBird platform can be live on your website in six to eight weeks, but you'll want to decide beforehand what media you want to create for launch - virtual tours, 360 photospheres, seasonal overlays, wayfinding routes, etc. Talk to your map developer to agree on a timeline before getting started on the project.
4) Plan Your Promotions Ahead of Time
Before the map is finished, you should have a plan in place to promote it to your audiences. You can highlight your map in a variety of ways, helping you reach multiple constituencies:
- First and foremost - to all staff - who will like to hear about your new interactive map before it's public, and who may have many uses for it in helping students, parents, and other visitors find their way to a specific location.
- On social media, reaching both students, staff and alumni.
- Via emails and e-newsletters reaching your current students and potential students who have not visited your campus yet and/or parents who are interested in their child's potential home for the next few years.
- In your alumni magazine/website, as a way for past graduates to revisit the campus, take a virtual tour, and see the positive changes since their graduation.
- In personal communication, both from your major gift officers and your admissions counselors.
- In a press release and outreach to your local broadcast, print and online media, who will likely enjoy and possibly use the map - and its content - to help promote your events and campus happenings.
Understanding and planning how you can get the word out about your new interactive campus map will help you maximize its success once it's live.
5) Establish Post-Launch Management Plan
Finally, it's important to establish clear guidelines on who will manage and maintain the interactive map once it's live. Often, that function is shared across multiple departments, with IT or the web development team at the helm. But in many cases, much of the post-launch management will be shared by admissions, marketing and other departments with student, parent and alumni-facing roles, as coming up with a strategy and plan for creating map-based media can greatly assist their daily initiatives.In other words, expectations on who will manage the map after its launch can vary.
Before it goes live, it's smart to set a clear plan in place for to manage the map and create media.Creating an interactive campus map is an exciting and fulfilling endeavor, and one that will serve the needs of your students, staff, parents and alumni for years to come.
But it's good to start the creation process on the right foot and be well-prepared and ready to incorporate the map - and the virtual tours and other media it highlights - into your marketing, admissions, communications and other efforts. Following the above five steps will help you do just that, enabling you to launch an interactive map that will attract future students, serve current staff, students and visitors, and help you increase the exposure of your beautiful campus.
To ensure that your interactive map is valuable for all, it's smart to get buy-in from all of the departments that can benefit from it. Highlighting the ways your peers can take advantage of the interactive map will go a long way toward getting them on board, and you'll end up with an interactive map that is beneficial to a host of constituencies on and off campus.
Topics: Virtual Tour, Campus Map, College Campus Tours
