topic Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department in ArcGIS Solutions Questions

Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 23:16:10 GMT

This will be a little bit of a different "question" from the normal GeoNet questions, but I am hoping to gather some ideas.

I work for a small engineering firm that does Civil Engineering and Land Survey kind of work. We sometimes go to a conference and exhibit what we do. For awhile I have had the idea of trying to promote my GIS department (which is a department of one) by showing off the use of different apps and maps in the world of engineers and surveyors.

I wanted to ask you, the great people of GeoNet, what sort of things have you seen, or done, at a conference/trade show (not necessarily GIS related) that caught your attention?

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I had ideas of having some kind of interactive "game" where people could find, or guess, a specific location based on an arbitrary photo and maybe they get "points" based on how close they were to the actual location. This could be fun but it may not fully demonstrate that much GIS "power" (plus I don't have the best idea on how to calculate the points and tally it up later - need to put more thought into it). I think it would be great to use interactive apps and maps (like Survey123 for ArcGIS‌, Collector for ArcGIS‌, Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS‌, ArcGIS StoryMaps‌, Crowdsourcing‌, and newer things that I haven't touched yet like ArcGIS QuickCapture‌ and Tracker for ArcGIS‌).

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 13:30:56 GMT

I should probably tag other things like

Departments of Transportation‌, Transportation‌, Esri Roads and Highways‌, ArcGIS for Public Transit‌, CAD/GIS Data Integration‌, etc.

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

LarryMasters — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 15:34:37 GMT

Adrian,

It has been my experience that anything showing changes over time draws attention. Big monitor with a slide show showing project changes over time work well. If it is surveying and the project is land development (subdivision), show original parcel, then one after the lots were divided up (different versions if necessary), things like that. The reason slide shows are better is that it is a quick change on the monitor and peoples eyes are drawn to movement. Specifically quick movements. It works better than videos. Construction projects for pipelines, tanks, treatment plants, all those things work well also.

Would love to see what you come up with after you decide.

Best of luck,

Larry

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 16:01:35 GMT

Larry,

This is a wonderful idea. I agree that moving things captures people's attention quite well. I understand what you're saying about a slideshow versus a video, but what about an animated video created from ArcGIS that shows progression over time, than can be somewhat slideshow related?

I came across this video yesterday:

The Biggest Cities In The United States From 1790 To 2018, Visualized - Digg

But it's not a 'video' to where I can pause and play it. But I love it. The data is fun and the graphical idea of it is intriguing (but it's information that I enjoy so maybe that makes a difference). So, this makes me think maybe something like a GIF would work just as well...

Thanks for the ideas and I'll be sure to report back with what we come up with (a few months away).

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

JoeBorgione — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 16:08:49 GMT

Adrian- we have an internal portal that we add pages to that target specific divisions and link to ESRI solutions etc. You can use AGOL the same way. I'm currently working on a 'What Is GIS' story map that I'll be presenting to a brown-bag type of lunch discussion; basic concepts, nomenclature, and visuals of typical analyses.

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

DerekLaw — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 16:10:21 GMT

Hi Adrian,

> ... what sort of things have you seen, or done, at a conference/trade show (not necessarily GIS related) that caught your attention?

Working at conferences/trade shows, I typically have my laptop and a single medium-sized display monitor. I will typically have Chrome browser open with 7-10 different tabs, where each tab shows a relevant web page, web app, document, etc. I use a Chrome browser extension called Revolver (available free) - which enables the browser to rotate through the various tabs. In effect, I get a slideshow in Chrome. This is great as it rotates through the different tabs and helps draw attention to my monitor.

Hope this helps,

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 16:44:31 GMT

Joe Borgione,

"What is GIS" is the never ending question! I'd like to see that sometime if it were public. And... maybe just maybe I could drop by and watch your presentation, haha! (btw, are you coming to the SLUG meeting next week at DNR?)

Anyways, great idea, thanks!

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 16:46:36 GMT

Derek,

This is a great idea and I haven't seen the Revolver app before. I'll definitely be checking this app out.

Thanks!

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

JoeBorgione — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 18:51:35 GMT

Adrian- I may sneak over to the slug meeting next week. When I get the what is gis done, I'll send you the url...

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 15:06:43 GMT

Thanks Joe! I look forward to it.

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

PeterRastall — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 12:19:43 GMT

"I had ideas of having some kind of interactive "game" where people could find, or guess, a specific location based on an arbitrary photo and maybe they get "points" based on how close they were to the actual location."

- Check out GeoGuessr - https://geoguessr.com - it's exactly what you describe but using Google Maps.

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

PaulSolsrud — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 13:26:02 GMT

Adrian,

Thank you for bringing this up. We struggle with this as well. It's hard to even create graphics that can clearly show what we're talking about since it's so abstract for many people.

Does anyone know if ESRI provides any sort of "GIS Stock Imagery" we can use to help tell the GIS story? If not, this could really be a big help.

Per your question, I've done presentations before where I've started with a slide showing a screen shot of a spreadsheet. "everyone know what this is, it's pretty powerful, we can do some cool stuff, etc" then I flip to a slide that has all of the data from the spreadsheet mapped (it was businesses that could be targeted customers for the attendees) showing locations, vivid colors and differing sizes of points based on assumed company size, and likelihood of purchase. That actually worked pretty well, so maybe there's a way we could us the "before and after GIS" approach with your slideshow/GIF idea. Spreadsheet to a map of data, a hand drawing to an interactive design map, someone pointing in a field to AR views, hand measuring a pile of dirt to a drone calculation, staking sheets to collector maps, paper surveys vs survey123 apps etc.

We've also tried to show people how they use some sort of GIS more than they think, google maps, yelp, snapchat maps, maps at the mall, uber...

If there's a way to have some "advertising group" here, I'd be game to be part of it.

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 21:07:44 GMT

Geoguesser is hard! And you can only get one aspect of it for free. The rest costs $$. Which is ok, but I wonder how to incorporate that kind of technology in ArcGIS Online web maps? I suppose using the analyst tool of Find Nearest would do that while consuming a small amount of credits. Though I am not sure on how to make this automatically happen... Maybe it's something to look into. Thanks for the idea!

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

AdrianWelsh — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 21:13:24 GMT

Paul,

Maybe we should submit an Idea for Esri to have stock photography...

Thanks for the ideas. I like the before and after approach. I agree that this can help people to understand GIS a little better, especially mentioning that they use it daily with other applications.

I too would want to be part of an advertising or marketing group! I suppose we could start one but I kind of doubt it would get good traffic on GeoNet. There aren't too many questions related to this field that could be directed to a group like that.

Re: Ideas on advertising your GIS department

JoeBorgione — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 21:35:54 GMT

For imagery I've just googled terms like 'arcgis metadata' or 'esri geocoding' and then looked at what there is. I've used those two specific terms for images in story maps I've created for training purposes...