Ideas on advertising your GIS department

[AdrianWelsh]

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).

[PeterRastall]

"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.

[AdrianWelsh]

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!

[PaulSolsrud]

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.

[AdrianWelsh]

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.

[JoeBorgione]

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...