… to serve hundreds of global clients at our biggest event of the year

 We’re always excited to put our newest products for DMOs to the test, but at our biggest event of the year? Serving 600+ clients from across the globe? Well, it’s not like our crazy marketing team hasn’t done it before with the new Summit App in 2017. So why not put our new Map Publisher up for a challenge or two at our 2018 users conference?

Oh yes we did.

And the results were … wow. But let’s start at the beginning …

It was time to make one of those tough decisions in event-planning. While Tucson is home to Simpleview’s headquarters and has served as the location of our annual users’ conference for the last 12 years, the growth of the Simpleview Summit attendee list meant we needed larger meeting spaces and more overnight accommodations. After much consideration, we decided to move our Summit from Tucson to Scottsdale. New city, new, bigger event venue. No small feat.

We say change = opportunity. The Simpleview marketing team and I knew we needed to make the new, different, larger Summit location easy to navigate for hundreds of global attendees and Simpleview staff (some new, some accustomed to another venue in another city). That’s where Map Publisher came into play. We used Map Publisher to create digital and printed maps and signs to improve two situations at the 2018 Summit: the attendee experience at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess and the Dine Around Scottsdale event.

Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Venue Map

Available as part of the Summit mobile phone app, our interactive venue map created in Map Publisher highlighted resort facilities of particular relevance to Summit attendees - 14 in total across four categories. Color coding and categorization distinguished resort amenities from meeting spaces, and contact information was included for user convenience.

Dine Around Scottsdale Event Maps

Large foam core signs mapping out three restaurant hubs and their dining options were displayed by shuttle pick-up zones on Dine-Around Night. Using Map Publisher, these signs were originally created as digital maps within the Simpleview CMS, then conveniently exported as 23” x 31” PDFs to be printed onsite at the resort’s Fedex office. After reviewing the signs and selecting their restaurant hub and corresponding shuttle, attendees could then scan the QR code printed on each sign or use the Summit conference app via VisitApps to access the interactive maps.

Interactive dine-around maps showcased restaurant listings within each hub, offering photos, phone numbers, website URLs, and descriptions of each venue through the app on attendees’ phones.

And opportunity paid off, big time.

4 reasons we’d trust Map Publisher again for a major event

• We Saved Time and Money with the First Use
  
  For the Simpleview marketing team, the new Map Publisher drastically reduced the number of hours and resources it would’ve taken to create these maps individually with a combination of tools.
   
• Just One Program to Create, Customize, and Edit Both Online and Print Maps
  
  Each interactive map was created in Map Publisher and embedded digitally on the app. The same tool allowed us to export the digital map into a PDFs that could be customized in a variety of ways—including by logo, QR code, theme, or layout—and printed.
   
• Anyone Can Use Map Publisher (even without our CRM or CMS)
  
  Despite not having a Simpleview CMS, CRM or API that fed listings to Map Publisher in this case, my team and I were still able to create high-quality, branded event maps. Meanwhile, the user experience for attendees transferred seamlessly from print to digital with just the click of a QR code.
   
• Easy to Add Key Details for a Smooth Customer Experience
  
  Our interactive maps put detailed venue descriptions and contact information in the palms of our attendees’ hands. DMOs can pull their member/partner listings from CRM directly into Map Publisher to build detailed maps quickly and with greater accuracy.

I’d say that makes this risk opportunity a win, for both my marketing team, our many Summit attendees, and, in the end, for DMOs like yours.