TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What is a Place?
- Examples of Use Cases for Places
- Get Started: Adding a Place
- How to Add a Place Instructional Video
Visitors often seek resources to find must-see attractions and activities. Traditional paper guides are costly and wasteful. Driftscape, North America’s most trusted tourism solution, helps you answer the question “What is there to do here” by empowering you with a mobile app and interactive map where you can highlight your sites and stories, enhance them with unlimited multimedia, provide turn-by-turn instructions, and update content anytime at no extra cost!
What is a Place?
Places consist of a single point on the map with associated text, images/videos, and audio.
Note: Users can filter all the content they see in Driftscape by Places, Events & Tours.
Examples of Use Cases for Places
Examples of “Places” on Driftscape can be anything from historic sites and landmarks, local attractions and businesses, places to stay and dine, and any other key local spots you think will be worth visiting.
Use Case 1: Sites and Stories
Want to share the captivating tale of a local hero or highlight the charm of a significant landmark? A Place POI is your perfect way to do it! Use the description box to weave the narrative, bringing their story to life with rich details. Enhance the experience by adding a video interview with the local hero or an expert in the media gallery.
Use Case 2: Museum Showcase
Imagine having an app for your museum that can help create buzz and showcase its artifacts. Simply map your museum as a "Place" in the app, enhance its media gallery with a captivating 360-degree tour video, and include a "Buy your ticket" button for a seamless trip planning experience. This quick, five-minute effort can put your museum and other key local sites on the map!
These are just a couple of examples of how you can map a site in the app and create a more immersive experience! With more user engagement features than any other travel app in the market, Driftscape helps you innovate your storytelling experience!
Get Started: Adding a Place
Step 1: Access the Driftscape Content Management System [CMS]
Log into the CMS at cms.driftscape.com using your Username/Password credentials.
Note: Your login credentials were shared with you by your Driftscape representative. If you need help logging in, or to reset your credentials, contact your Driftscape rep.
Once logged in, you will see the ‘Organization Content’ screen. If you don’t automatically see this screen, choose ‘ORG CONTENT’ from the header menu located in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
You will see a list of your organizations, Click on the name of the organization to which you would like to add your Place.
Step 2: Add the text content for your Place
Choose ‘ADD A PLACE’
Enter a ‘Title’ for your Place. This would typically be the name of the site or business.
Enter the address of your place in the ‘Time and Venue’ field. If no address is associated with the place you are adding, you can leave this field blank.
Note: Adding a written address is helpful as it allows your visitors to input the details in any other navigation tool, such as their car’s navigation system, if they wish to.
Enter your written description in the Description field. This is what visitors will see when they view your Place in Driftscape. Include any key info that you want visitors to know. As a best practice, tell a story about what makes this place special!
Recommended word count: Be brief. Around 200 words max is ideal.
There are other helpful tools accessible to you within the description box toolbar, such as adding website, email address, and or phone links, formatting your text, and more. For details on these features, visit the article How to Add Written Descriptions to a POI.
IMPORTANT! Add a Category for your place. Each Place should be assigned to the most relevant category. For example, if your place is a hotel, check the box for the “Accommodation” Category. You can assign more than one category to a Place when relevant, but we suggest selecting a maximum of two categories. This is an important step as users can filter their mobile app view to show them only those POIs (Points of Interest) that fall under a specific category.
Below the category selection, you will see a number of other fields. Typically, you do not need to do anything with these fields when creating a place except change the 'Visibility' to Public when you’re ready to make your POI live in the mobile app and interactive map. We’ll come back to that. All new Places are in Draft until you change their visibility to Public.
Here is a brief explanation of the fields below:
Allow Discovery Mode: Leave set to ‘Yes’ for Places.
Quest Type: Leave set to ‘None’ for Places.
Enable Foreground Notifications: Leave set to ‘Yes’ for Places.
Starts/Ends: This does not apply to Places.
Author: If you wish to indicate who wrote the Place/POI, you can do it here. Multiple authors are permitted. This field will not be displayed to app users.
Copyright: If your Place/POI is under copyright, enter that here. This field will not be displayed to app users. If your copyright information needs to be public we recommend adding it to your written description.
Attributions: Enter any attributions here. This field will not be displayed to app users.
Note: All fields with a red asterisk [*] are required to complete a Place/POI.
Step 3: Add a location
Scroll to the top of the page and click the 'Location' tab.
Choose to work in ‘Map’ or ‘Satellite’ view
While mapping the location of your Place you have a few options:
Select a location on the map: Zoom to the area where your Place will be located and click on the map to place a marker at that specific location.
Add an address: You can also use the ‘Geocode an address’ bar below the map to zoom quickly to a specific address and place a marker at that address.
Enter the latitude/longitude information
Note: To make adjustments to the marker’s position, just drag it to a new location, or click a new spot on the map. Zoom all the way in before placing your marker. Location accuracy matters to users on the ground!
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click ‘ADD’ to add your Place to the map and to see what your Place looks like so far. You may have noticed in the Main tab that Visibility was set to ‘Draft’. Unless you have changed this to ‘Public,’ nobody will see your point of interest yet.
Step 4: Add Media
With Driftscape, you can add unlimited images, videos and audio files to your Places!
A minimum of one image per Place is recommended.
To add an image, scroll back up to top of the page and click on ‘EDIT MEDIA’
Click on ‘ADD A MEDIA ITEM’
Under ‘Media Type’ select ‘Image’ since we will add a photo first. Click the ‘Choose File’ button to select the image you want to upload. JPG, PNG, GIF and SVG formats are supported (8MB max). You will need to navigate to the folder on your computer where that image is saved and select it. When you’ve selected your image, click ADD at the bottom of your screen.
To add other types of media, and for general media guidelines, visit our How to Add Media article.
To reorder uploaded media files, edit the Media No. of each image or video to your preferred sequence. For example, set the Media No. to 1 for the first image you want to display, and so on. By default, the media gallery numbers uploads starting from 1000, making it easier for you to renumber them starting from 1. You can leave gaps in your numbering of images (by numbering them 10, 20, 30 etc), which is helpful so you can add images in between existing media later on.
Step 5: Making Your Place Public
Changing a Place’s visibility to ‘Public’ means making it live in the app and thus visible to users. This live Place will count towards your allocated POI count. If your Organization is in ‘Trial’ mode, making it ‘Public’ will only make it visible to members of your own organization to whom permission has been granted.
Click ‘SEE THE POI’ to preview.
At the top of the page click ‘EDIT POI’ and change the Visibility from Draft to Public.
Use the ‘Visibility’ dropdown box to change from ‘Draft’ to ‘Public’
At bottom of the screen click on ‘Update’ and you are done Adding a Place!
Notes:
Remember if your organization is in ‘Trial’ mode, making Places public will only make them visible to individuals from your organization who have been granted access in the Driftscape CMS. This is useful for testing and review purposes.
You can make changes to any Place while it is Public, and your changes will automatically update in the app.
You're all set to promote tourism to your key sites! Remember, there's much more you can do with your Driftscape partnership. You can map gamified experiences, incentivize exploration, and more. Schedule a strategy session with your customer support rep for creative ideas on leveraging this trusted tourism solution to keep your destination top of mind!
To learn how to map other types of POI click on the links below:
How to Add a Place Instructional Video
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