Success stories from giveaway winners
About the Maptive Plus Giveaway: We give away one annual subscription to Maptive Plus each month (valued at $1250.00). Just tell us how Maptive Plus would help you! Selected winners are published on our blog.
Sierra Club
www.sierraclub.org
“I am a conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club Ohio Chapter Clean Water Campaign. Through the Ohio Water Sentinel Program, our Clean Water team has successfully trained more than 200 citizens since 2010; generating more than 1,000 entries of water quality data on more than 100 sub-watersheds.
As we continue to strengthen the program, we have found a great need to visually showcase and analyze the data that our volunteers submit. They want to see that their data is made visible to the public and they want to better understand water quality throughout Ohio’s watersheds by examining each other’s results. The more data we strive to map, the more benefits we see in being able to edit the data and upload excel sheets online.
While our volunteers are many, our staff team is relatively small at 2.5 employees. We are in great need of a mapping service that is easy to use, easy to edit and update, and easy to understand. We realize that visual analysis and mapping is a critical tool that we need to share our data with watershed groups, state and local agencies, and the general public. We believe that Maptive Plus would help us showcase our data and provide sufficient support for our growing database of water quality information.”
~ Amanda Keith
iversity
iwww.iversity.org
“I work for iversity, a Berlin-based online education platform that recently (last week!) launched its first set of free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Just one week in, we have over 130,000 students from all over the world enrolled in our courses, which range from architecture to storytelling and astrophysics.
We’d like to get a better idea of who our students are: where they live, how old they are, what their educational backgrounds and interests are, and what other languages they speak. We’ve collected a lot of this data already through surveys — what we need now is a way to easily visualize the data, so that we can use it to plan new courses, to show interested professors, potential investors, and the press.
We’ve found the free version of Maptive incredibly useful, but because of the sheer number of our students (which is growing fast!), we need a way to visualize more data points per map, as well as a way to display more types of information at the same time. Our courses are all free at the moment, so we can’t afford a full subscription yet, but we would love the opportunity to explore Maptive Plus’s advanced features so that we can show the world who our students are!
Thank you for this opportunity!”
~ Hania
Indian State University (RUEDI)
www.unboundpossibilites.com
“I am an MBA student at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. I work for an organization at ISU called RUEDI (Rural-Urban Entrepreneurship Development Institute.) RUEDI’s primary objective is to improve the rural economy in Indiana by increasing entrepreneurship and new business start-ups in rural communities across the state. In doing so, we have developed multiple initiatives that will help address these issues including an Artisan Trail a food-hub, and a Leadership Alliance, amongst numerous others. All of our initiatives focus on strengthening the economy in rural areas, promoting job-growth, and increasing information and support services for Indiana’s small rural businesses.
Maptive has been such a useful tool in our efforts. We are currently working on a website with a rural community index that will help pinpoint businesses and clusters of specific industries in our 6-county region. With the added features of Maptive Plus we will be able to consolidate all of our research efforts and create maps that will have the ability to list all the regions businesses, their locations, and make available all their valuable information. This will enable start-ups and entrepreneurs’ access to a wealth of information, and it will help visualize their efforts with the use of Maptive Plus. I have used several mapping tools, and Maptive is by far the most user-friendly and most comprehensive tool available. I would love the opportunity to explore and share all the advanced possibilities that Maptive Plus has to offer!”
~ Nicole M. Alters
SteelMaster Buildings
www.steelmasterusa.com
“I’m a marketing assistant at SteelMaster Buildings, a company that has been selling prefabricated arched steel buildings to residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural customers around the world for more than 30 years. During that period, we’ve sold tens of thousands of structures – a figure that makes the task of mapping sold buildings particularly daunting.
We map our buildings because as an inside sales organization, we don’t have a showroom or salesmen who make house calls. Having an effective, easy-to-update map that describes and depicts our sold buildings is therefore an important tool for building customer trust and winning sales opportunities.
For the past three years, we have used Google Maps to build our maps, but that requires us to create each location individually using a time-intensive process that our marketing coordinator, Zandra, says involved “at least ten steps. It was awful.”
How did she feel when she discovered Maptive Plus?
“The Hallelujah Chorus was playing in my head. Maptive Plus is everything we wished we had when we started down this road.”
Having the ability to place upwards of 40,000 sortable data points on one map in just a few minutes would be invaluable to SteelMaster’s business. Maptive Plus would help us build brand legitimacy by communicating how many buildings we’ve sold, and where they’re located, in a user-friendly format. It also would let customers sort building data in the way that’s most helpful to them, whether they want to see A-Model buildings in the Midwest or all buildings wider than 30 feet located in Rapides Parish, Louisiana.
Maptive Plus’s street view and proximity features would allow us to showcase more buildings than we currently can by reducing production time. Furthermore, it would allow us to do so in a way that’s more helpful to potential customers than our present method of including a customer-provided photo with each map location.
Maptive Plus will provide us with an invaluable sales tool that not only fits the scale of our business better than Google Maps or Maptive Free, it gives us more time to do what we’re most passionate about: selling buildings.”
Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley
sv.cmu.edu
“I was recently appointed the Director of Admissions & Alumni Relations for Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. As a branch campus located over 2600 miles away from the home institution, we experience numerous challenges in recruiting and alumni relations that our traditional (counterpart) programs do not face.
I rely heavily on our strong alumni connections. Having data and a “snapshot” of the diversity of our alumni, would prove to be very useful in educating potential students on the relevancy of our campus location. Additionally, being a smaller, branch campus, also comes with the added challenges of a much smaller budget. The marketing department budget encompasses branding and advertising, along with recruitment and events, leaving almost nothing for alumni relations.
Additionally, when visiting professional conferences, such as NAFSA, where I learned about maptive.com, a visual aid showing the variety of international locations of our alumni would be greatly beneficial in networking with other international educators who may be able to provide resources and opportunities for our alumni around the world.”
“I have been trying to fit the needs of a company that makes and distributes medical refrigeration units and other medical equipment. We are located in Indiana and our custmers cover the globe. This is something that is quite difficult to keep track of in general for multiple people to have access to. We pride ourselves in helping others and distribute gifts to places that are poverty stricken and miles away from a city large enough to have someone who specializes in such equipment and these people need our equipment to hold an entire communities blood supply at times.
We currently use an old copy of a competitor’s product and it is not even close to fitting our needs but we have made it work because of cost of getting something new and learning a new product. We have six people who need to have access to a world map with pins of our suppliers and able to search by country and/or by company name to find the closest one to our customer. Eventually we are going to need to be able to add the ability to search for what equipment each company will service. Maptive seems quite more user friendly than what we are currently using and the staff are quite helpful.”
~ Amanda Joseph
BRAC
www.brac.net
“BRAC, being the largest NGO in the world which has 120,000 employees, has huge volume of data and always tries to find how to present it visually. In this regard, Maptive seems to have a great potential. It will be extremely useful in helping us to better understand how our Education, Health, Gender Justice and Diversity and Human Rights and Legal Aids Service programs are distributed within Bangladesh. With numerous programs running in Bangladesh, we are operating in Afghanistan, Uganda, Tanzania, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Philippines. We are planning to use maptive to see if there’s any overlapping of programmes. It will reduce our travel costs, unnecessary travel times and environmental impacts. Besides, we believe it will be helpful to identify the potential areas to start new programs. We need to understand how existing geographical linkages between the programs could be utilized more effectively and Maptive can help us to see the bigger picture.”
~ Anjali Sarker
The Community Foundation
www.peoplewhocare.org
“We are a nonprofit Community Foundation (1 of about 800 in the US and 1,800 worldwide). I’ve recently included a free version of maptive in our organization dashboard to allow our Board and Staff to visually see our current grantees from a spatial perspective. We regularly share our dashboard template with our colleagues and recently displayed it on a communications listserv with a distribution of several thousand. I’d very much like to take advantage of the Plus version but we can not afford the cost. We are often called on because of our technology innovation and Maptive is an important tool. Hopefully, this meets your criteria for a free upgrade for a worthy community based organization
~ Brian Frederick
Ecotourism Australia
www.ecotourism.org.au
“Ecotourism Australia, formed in 1991 as a not-for-profit organisation has significantly contributed to long term environmental sustainability on a national and global level through its ground breaking tourism certification programs. We certify tourism operators and products as being environmentally, culturally and socially responsible all around Australia. By being able to use Maptive Plus and all the extended features we could map out our certified businesses. This would benefit our 3 person team greatly and help drastically with compliance, marketing and itinerary planning.”
~ Leonie Bowles
The Royal Bank of Scotland ( www.rs.co.uk) has received a free 1 year subscription to Maptive Plus!
“Maptive has proven extremely useful in helping us to better understand how our leaders are distributed globally in order to reduce travel costs, reduce our impact on the environment and reduce unnecessary travel times. Our businesses are split into 4 regions (Americas, EMEA, APAC and UK & Ireland). This solution helped us pin point the exact location of our leaders and match them to the region that would be best to attend an event closest to their location, for example the country of Russia falls under our EMEA region. Previously, these leaders would only be offered to attend an event within Western Europe, however a number of leaders are based in Far Eastern Russia therefore it would be better to attend an event in our APAC region rather than travel to Europe. Without the ability to pin point their location on the map, we would not have been able to visualise this easily.”
“Your product would allow me to help Hifzur. Hifzur is an associate of mine who operates a small cleaning company in Vancouver BC. In 1997 Hifzur immigrated from Sri Lanka with a dream to provide his family a better life! I would like to help Hifzur target customers in specific areas so that he doesn’t have to drive all over the lower mainland (which is a pain) and can save money on fuel (which can purchase his children food and clothing). Thanks for your time.”
~ Mathew Rudolph