As you may know, we’ve been hard at work on an all new Map Your City.
The biggest project we’re focused on is an almost complete rewrite of how Map Your City's communities work, which began April last year. This post is the first in a series of previews we’re sharing as we get ready to launch. Today, we’re going to talk about what it’s like to start with communities in Map Your City.
This is our approach
Communities are the marquee feature of Map Your City as we aspire to empower professionals and businesses in location marketing to create more impact and improve the experience of people searching for what’s going on in the places they live, work and play. Today location marketing is still a disjointed, difficult process and there are no platforms offering a seamless integrated online experience for marketing professionals. What we found, when celebrating the work of communities and empowering businesses and professionals to work together to promote a town, a city, destination or business – this not only lowered their costs and improved their ROI, but it also increased customer loyalty & advocacy. In short, working in communities resulted in a better bottom line for businesses and better valued experiences by their customers.
Our goal was to create an experience that makes sense for those aiming to get their brand’s or destination’s message across and for their customers at the same time. And we wanted to design our product to enable professionals to market those experiences for their customers at scale. We have been a double sided platform from the start, serving both those who are promoting their locations as well as people searching for places and experiences. However, until now we have served both sides quite separated experiences. As a result we had a hard time explaining each audience (now called storytellers and explorers) what value Map Your City could deliver. Next to some other improvements and very much needed changes – this change-up forced us to rewrite almost all of how communities work on Map Your City.
This is how it works
W e made Map Your City the place where Explorers and Storytellers meet and it now starts in the Map Your City mobile app with the same experience for every one. Although it starts out similar, the user journey is no longer a linear one, but rather depends on your interactions in the Map Your City mobile app. Making it more of a holistic or integrated approach.
Now when you would like to get started with a Map Your City community, the process is clear, simple and frictionless. Communities are at the center of Map Your City. A Map Your City community is simply a group of people mapping and telling stories together – like your company, organization, city or town. You can follow or join a community – or – create your own. And it all starts by downloading the Map Your City app.
We'll do the work for you
When you decide to create a community and you’ve set up, Map Your City works for you, even when you’re not working. Invite new members by adding their email address and we will do the heavy-lifting for you. Or set up your community to accept requests to join in the mobile app. We’ll also keep your followers updated on changes happening in your community and interactions with your locations.
Choose messaging that gets delivered
We are also excited to let you know we have brought sending custom in-app notifications to the Essentials Plan. Push notifications have a much better track record for open and click through rates than email. Your followers would like to hear from you – it is the very reason they have chosen to follow your community. They love you for sending them timely, authentic and valuable messages at a time that is convenient for them
Made for Explorers
M ap Your City is made for exploring and (re)discovering the cities or towns you live, play or work in. It is now even easier to find places you fancy and discover great communities. Even create a treasure map full of your favorite finds. And we are excited to have some amazing new communities to explore.
The new app and business dashboard features I’ve previewed today are right around the corner. You’ll gradually see some changes in upcoming weeks. We’re so excited, and we hope you are, too.
Caroline Vrauwdeunt – Caroline is founder and CEO of ANDRS Projects – the company that builds Map Your City.
These changes are scheduled to be released in July. We’ll keep you updated.
Map Your City is on a mission to enable you to tell or experience authentic stories at the places that matter to you.
No credit card required – simply download the app. And start creating, exploring or (re)discovering the cities you live, play and work in.
