From CampusBird Blog
Fort Worth Country Day, an independent college-preparatory school that has been serving coeducational students for more than 50 years, has implemented a new fully responsive digital campus map that allows the school to take full control of its digital information hub. The Fort Worth Country Day Campus Map uses CampusBird's mapping and virtual tour technology, built on top of Google Maps and viewable both on desktop and mobile devices.
The interactive campus map includes a step-by-step walking tour, high-resolution photographs, detailed text descriptions, point-by-point directions to campus locations via multiple modes of travel, and panning and zooming capabilities. The powerful platform-administration tools and ability to assign permissions across multiple users enables school officials to easily manage all aspects of the map creation and upgrades.
“The ability to make changes easily was one of the first things that impressed us with CampusBird,” said Steve Uhr, Director of Technology at Fort Worth Country Day. “We can just access the platform, create a piece of content, and drop in pins to mark it. Nothing takes longer than a couple of hours, and we can do it all ourselves.”
One of the items on the map that stands out most is the step-by-step walking tour, which mirrors the real-world admissions tour. The idea behind this feature is for families to take the virtual tour and then be encouraged to visit the school in person–where the admissions office gets the opportunity to give them the tour in person.
“The map is definitely a marketing tool; it’s the primary way for visitors, parents and prospective students to familiarize themselves with our school,” Uhr added.
The tours also serve the community as a whole. For example, Uhr’s team created a custom tour for the popular Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS) Arts Festival, which is being hosted by Fort Worth Country Day in 2015.
Along with creating new content, school officials are using the technology to update existing content as major changes occur on campus. A new athletic complex and new tennis stadium were able to be quickly updated and reflected on the map.
The new platform was introduced as part of the school’s website redesign last spring. The challenge the school had been facing was that the old map was comprised of layers within Photoshop with a Flash overlay, and therefore it was difficult to update.
“While it was technically possible to make changes, the process was convoluted and didn’t encourage us to make changes,” Uhr said. “We wanted a map that was fully responsive and easy to update, and that’s what we got.”
For more information and to view the new technology, please visit http://www.fwcd.org/Page/Campus-Map.
Topics: Campus Map, College Campus Tours, Interactive Virtual Experiences
