Atlanta Botanical Garden Transforms Holiday Light Show with Geofencing & GPS Maps

Bo Shell, Sr. Manager, Design and Communications of Atlanta Botanical Gardens shared how the Atanlta Botanical Garden transformed their award winning Holiday Lights exhibit using GPS Maps and Geofencing. Find the transcript and time stamps below.

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Casey Loewenthal: [00:00:00] We're joined today. My name is Casey Lowenthal. I'm the customer success manager here at Engage by Cell. And we are joined by none other than Bo Schell from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, senior manager, design, communications, marketing. If, if you can name it, Bo probably does it at Atlanta Botanical Gardens and does it well.

So we thought today we'd come on and talk about a project that we all worked on the last few months and just dive into it and show you guys all that mobile technology is not scary and can be a great benefit to to all you guys on some level. So thank you, Bo, for joining. Of course. Thank you so much.

I'm gonna start out real quick with a little bit of about Engage by Cell. For any of you who are unfamiliar, some of you are current clients of ours, so this may be redundant, but we've been around for 17 years. We actually started out in the cultural [00:01:00] realm with audio tours, and as cell phones expand every year, our technology does as well, so we branched out from audio tours to mobile smartphone tours to GPS mapping and text messaging.

The technology with phones used to just be pretty basic, but now they're personal computers in all of our pockets, so we're gonna embrace that technology, and part of today is gonna be Bose. Dilemma of being at a beautiful cultural institution while also trying to engage through technology and kind of how those coincide symbiotically.

So Bo's going to explain all of that. Then we have 4, 000 clients in 10 countries. And here's some recognizable names of some of our clients that we've worked with on different varieties of mobile technologies, audio tours, GPS mapping. Scavenger hunts downtown Houston was another one that did a Christmas holiday [00:02:00] exhibition as well.

So they had some similar use cases, but today we're going to focus on Atlanta botanical gardens and the awesome work that they did for their garden lights exhibit.

Now I'm going to. Let Bo take it from here and give a little bit of detail about what is Garden Lights Holiday Nights at Atlanta Botanical

Bo Shell: Gardens. Yeah, so thank you so much Casey. Hello everybody. A little bit about me. My name is Bo Schell. I've been at the Garden for nine years. As Casey mentioned, I'm in the marketing department and so we handle Anything that's designed anything with a logo on it, digital in print advertising, all that good stuff.

So super excited to talk with everyone today. So we are 30 acre botanical garden. We're working on expanding in the next couple of years. And we kind of have a two fold piece of our, of our mission, our year. And some of you will experience this as well. We've got our gorgeous daytime visitation.

Thank you nine months out of the year and then during the holiday season, about 13, 14 years ago, we started Garden Lights Holiday Nights, [00:03:00] which is our open nightly holiday lights extravaganza. We're open from 5pm to 11pm, Monday through Sunday, including all holidays. It was transformative for the garden when we created this more than a decade ago.

And even more so in the past couple of years we've increased that profile and we were lucky enough to participate in ABC TV's, the great Christmas light fight, which we won their heavyweight division after a couple of very challenging filming evenings, it was all worth it. And yeah, it's been transformative to our budget.

We'd like to say the garden lights helps the garden shine all year and supports our nonprofit mission, but it brings some very unique challenges. I talk about that one of our busiest times as Mother's Day weekend will be coming up in May, obviously that our busiest time is would look like maybe 3, 000, 6, 000 people over an entire weekend.

Well, we have about that many people come to the [00:04:00] garden between 5 and 11 p. m. Almost every night of the holiday season. So yeah, garden lights is the really big deal. It's, it's really exciting for us to extend our mission in a new way and connecting people with plants in some unexpected ways. Yeah, perfect.

Casey Loewenthal: Awesome. Well, thanks for explaining that. 200, 000 visitors crammed in a shorter period of time. I imagine that comes with some, some challenges and some navigational issues and logistics. Will you kind of describe maybe why we initially started talking about how to tackle the garden lights with mobile technology and what would really be a benefit to Atlanta Botanical Gardens if we you.

Kind of helped ease some of those frustrations.

Bo Shell: So we are very lucky to participate in some pretty sophisticated audience studies each year for Garden Light. So we survey every ticket purchaser that comes through the door via email. And our marketing firm, our marketing research firm here in Atlanta you [00:05:00] know, always point to three things people parking and price.

So we, you know, as our marketing, there's only so much we can do. We can't build another parking deck. We can't increase the capacity of the garden itself. And so we're looking at ways to help solve. The kind of communication problem and kind of meet our audience where they are, let them know that we understand their frustrations in trying to literally get into the gardens.

There's a lot of folks coming in at one time. So that was one fold. And then, you know, another piece of this is when you're actually in the garden, it's dark and something unique about our garden lights guests is that they're not the same daytime visitor. Our footprint during garden lights really grows.

far outside the metro Atlanta area to Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina. We get a lot of tourists, a lot of first time visitors coming to the garden. It's been a great introduction, but they don't know their way [00:06:00] around. And as many of you from kind of the larger locations know that. Even sometimes for new staff, it's difficult to find your way between here, there, and yonder, particularly in the dark.

We're spending a lot on maps in order to help do that, and also some lighted signage in the garden. And we've been able to make some improvements. But then we also had this kind of opportunity fortuitously while the audience research was telling us ways that we can communicate with our guests throughout their experience that the garden lights experience starts at when you leave the house.

It's not something that you just encounter when you get here. That we also had a sponsor who was interested in increasing their investment in the garden. They had kind of maxed out all of their on site opportunities. As a title sponsor, as a presenting sponsor, as it were. And they came to us and said, well, we want to do more.

And we really want that to align with our goals to be in the technology sector. Do you have [00:07:00] anything in that sector? And that answer was thankfully, yes. We've got some ideas and we wanted to kind of. You know, the sky was the limit on what we could do. And after meeting with our internal teams who had already had a relationship with engaged by cell, as Casey said, through our audio tours we kind of realized that like the sky was the limit and we could make this into what we wanted it to be.

And we needed to do it. Really fast in order to kind of take advantage of this opportunity from our sponsor and then do it our way, right? All of us work for different organizations with different perspectives on the cultural institutional experience that we offer. And we wanted to do this in a way that satisfied our sponsors needs, our guests needs, and our needs as an organization to communicate our brand through every experience our guests have here.

So in walks Casey and his team of [00:08:00] folks in at Engage by Sell, and we started the process. Here we go. Something brand new. We'd never tried it before.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, and what was a fun challenge for us too was as Bo had mentioned kind of from the beginning is the balance of technology to the nature experience.

Like they're still trying to provide a peaceful, trying to focus on the lights, but people do have that technology in their hands. So at some point you embrace it, but how much at what point of the experience. So that was kind of a fun challenge for us to learn from Bo about how. They view it versus how we view it and kind of come to a conclusion there.

All right. Perfect. Next slide. So how did we get here so as well mentioned we had prior experience for years with the land of botanical gardens for audio tours, and they branched out into the mobile tour and then this. Was even the next step with the GPS mapping and then geofencing, which we'll describe in a little bit.

As Bo mentioned, we they had a [00:09:00] sponsor which helped them kind of get to a certain level of what kind of technologies they could do, how they could adopt them get a, get it going. And then we created a variety of different tiered packages based on how. And much of an investment their sponsors really wanted to, to take and put into this project and solutions we chose was a combination of text messaging a mobile smartphone tour with GPS mapping and then added on geo fencing.

We'll kind of go through some of these a little bit quicker. So the visitor journey Bo, do you actually want to take this in terms of kind of leading up from the point of purchase of ticket to walking

Bo Shell: on site? Sure. So our audience research told us that a good way to think about improving the guest experience was understanding that it starts when someone leaves their home versus when they arrive at the garden.

We were [00:10:00] already emailing all of our guests on the day of their ticket purchases to let them know tonight's your night and here's some know before you go information. Busy nights are going to expect some traffic delays. Here's some links to information about the event itself, just to make your arrival as smooth as possible.

And also something that very specifically our audience research told us was that guests want to be entertained on their way in and they would love a playlist of holiday music inspired by the show. So much of our show is set to music, and so We were able to work in a Spotify playlist that that, depending on your level of subscription or what have you, you can interact with that.

And then once they were, we wanted them to know that we're with them in the journey and that. While we may not can can improve the actual arrival process, we can let you know that [00:11:00] we see you and that your tickets are valid. That's kind of the number one question. Concern when you're waiting in line to get a timed ticket.

If I'm late because of traffic, is my ticket still going to be good? And so we kind of needed a space to reassure them of that and also let them interact with us in case they had any questions. And then, of course, once they were it. They the garden. They kind of want to know where the hot spots are, and we wanted to give them time to prepare their understanding of the menus of the different bars and the food options that we have.

So we're we're promoting this in an email every night to every ticket holder email that we get through the purchase process, and then once they received that email, we say, Okay, well, definitely try our new mobile experience. Just click on this link and leave your phone up during the experience so that you can get.

GPS or geo fence based notifications as you come. So we had geo fence locations set up in a 20 [00:12:00] mile, a 10 mile and a one mile radius. This was a new kind of way that geo fencing worked for engaged by cell. So it was fun to set that up and tweak that journey. So that if you're coming from 20 miles out, we're saying, Hey, check out the menu, check out the playlist.

But everybody got that one mile that says, we see you coming. We know that there may be some traffic delays. Here's the way to stay busy. And then once you arrived, we kind of invited you a little bit deeper into the experience. And said, okay, well, here's the actual map now that you're here. And these are some in garden interactivity moments.

That we wanted you to say this. This is the popular picture opportunity. Why don't you stop and take a picture and tag us at hashtag Atlanta BG and included our social handles. So extending that experience and deepening the interaction here within the garden. And I want to touch quickly Casey on that idea of the kind of organic experience and we're trying to leave the technology at home.

We know we have an older [00:13:00] membership base. We have our, but our fastest growing audience is millennial parents. And so we want to meet our audience wherever they are. And this is not something that we're forcing on any of our guests. Of course, it's there if they want it. And we're hearing, you know, standing there, literally welcoming the guests and seeing this new sign and watching them stop and scan the arc, the QR code is a really, and it's.

Amazing after the work that went into making this happen to see that, but then also hearing reports from our older volunteers that say, Oh, I put this in the hands of someone who was a lot like me and coming to the garden, a big fan, but they don't love technology. And then after their experience in garden lights, coming back around to say, Hey, actually this was really helpful.

Like that's always really great. And. We have a lot of repeat guests that may never want this information. We have a lot of repeat guests that want to know more about the experience. And really we just scratched the surface with [00:14:00] what we can do this year. And we're looking forward to listening to our audience some more and learning out a little bit about other ways to make this process easier for them.

And easier on our teams here as well.

Casey Loewenthal: Perfect. Yeah. And too, with the 200, 000 visitors, I mean, you mentioned it in some of our calls that the person using the app may not even be the ticket purchaser. So, they may be an older crowd, but they may be coming with their younger audience, and they're going to be the ones that get the app open on their phone, and they're going to go in on the way in.

So you're kind of marketing to To all different areas, and then, and we like to think that our technology, even if it is advanced in some levels, does have some easy barriers to kind of jump through in order to get access to. Thanks for for expanding on that journey. We mentioned geofencing how Boe and Engage by Cell set this up was a 20, 10 and a 5 mile.

Radius around the park. They realize that people are coming [00:15:00] in. He mentioned from out of state. They're coming in from all different avenues. So if you have the app open I think John had a question about the app does need to be open and, and bro pump bow, excuse me, prompted them to do that through his communication with them.

Pop ups will come in at the different radius is leading up to kind of getting into the the garden and helping them with the. The parking navigation. And we saw great results of, of audience audiences using all three of those prompts. So they did keep it open. And I mean, got a playlist to some music curated for you.

It is a full experience and both targeting them before they even get through the doors.

So the event app, so Bo and Atlanta Botanical Gardens had an app with us prior but we did want to help them in the process and part of that package was branding it to their investors so Bo being his design self had a lot of good points and and built those icons himself.

And then we kind of helped tweak it. We added multiple languages [00:16:00] there for their audience. That is through our system. Dana had that question. They chose English and Spanish. We have options of 120 different languages that can be translated through our our system automatically with Google Translate.

And then, The rest of the customizations was how big do you want the header? Where do you want the footer? Making the icons mobile responsive because all phones are different sizes whether you have an iPhone There's six different sizes of iPhones. So there was some Barriers to kind of go through to make it look and feel.

But we did have a tight timeframe on that as well. I think it was, it was started in August and had a November delivery date. So we moved pretty quickly on this and and it was great.

Bo Shell: And a point about the design portion of this, Casey, that I think it's interesting to notice that kind of anyone can get this stuff set up kind of right out of the box.

We knew we had an opportunity with [00:17:00] this sponsor. I'm lucky enough to have a team here and have the design skills and, you know, part of our industry is aesthetics. And if we're going to do it, we talk about doing it the garden way and trying to elevate it to the expectations that we've set for ourselves.

And so what we did did involve a lot of custom work, but I'll tell you, I actually just started working on our daytime app that is I know so much more about the platform now that I feel more comfortable doing things without any additional tweaks from the team and it's working great. I mean, I don't think you have to be, you don't have to be an expert in any of this to make it happen.

I think that the, where the team came in and engaged myself was saying, okay, well, you tell us what you want to do and we can make that happen. And the tweaks along the way and their understanding of how the mobile site could function. And we were developing this together, but don't think that for some of you at the smaller organizations that you immediately have to [00:18:00] have all of this design and user experience.

in your, in your organization, your past. It's built for everyone to use first. And then we labor, layered our sensibilities and our kind of design critiques on top of that. So yeah, it worked out well for everyone, I think. And it was fast, too. It was a pretty fast development process, thank goodness, on Engaged by Selvint.

For

Casey Loewenthal: sure,

Bo Shell: for sure.

Casey Loewenthal: If you guys have your phone handy, why don't you scan the QR code it's in the middle of the screen and that will show you exactly what Those team team built

right? GPS mapping. I, I'm biased. I love our services. I think this is the fun of service that our company offers, especially for the cultural

institutions. Like, many of you have with with big landscapes and. And big footprints in terms of your boundaries, [00:19:00] but the blue dot technology with Google allows you guys to build clickable points that can be customized with your own icons with your own categories. You can have restaurants, you can have restrooms, you can have photo opportunities like Bo and them set up or help navigate to different areas so that everyone's not clustered in one little section.

So, yeah. This feature is very, very cool. And helps the experience. I think Bo mentioned how the this doesn't replace paper maps, but we all know there's no technology in a paper map. As soon as you've walked away from where it is, you have to re navigate. And then there's also no data that you can provide in terms of how.

How this was used and when there's investors involved, that's what they're going to want to see. So having how many clicks, how many pages were viewed, how long were they on the page different technology and points that you can show your investors can help with some buy in for other opportunities.

Bo Shell: I want to be [00:20:00] clear too, that like, I handed a bunch of information over to to Casey and his team and essentially got this back. It's really incredible. There are, I had some our guest experience team out in the garden kind of collecting some GPS information early in the process. But then realized that there is.

There is a drag and drop GPS situation, so I can have this map open and say, add a marker and then drag the marker on the overlay and then it sits at the correct GPS position. So once the overlay piece is figured out, which there's some geniuses that engaged by cell that made this work. Once that is set and you don't have to have this overlay too.

This can work just on like a Google map, right? So it can be as, as, as deep of a design and experience investment as you want to make. But at the end of the process, I just said this drag and drop thing with these, with these things, [00:21:00] I never thought it would work in it. I think it's witchcraft. Like, I don't, I still don't understand it.

I just know that it worked for our guests and it works for me who literally set up the entire, the entire thing.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, perfect. We had a question about who creates the map. Beau touched on it a little bit. A lot of you organizations have a nice designed to scale map. Beau used the word overlay. We can overlay that on top of Google Maps, so it uses the technology with your branding on top.

Or if you don't have that to scale we can always use different skins that Google provides. They have a lot more than just the standard Google maps you use on your iPhone when you're trying to get to grandma's house. So we can do that stylized. There's darker versions. There's lighter versions.

We kind of played around with some of those at different points and landed on this one. But yeah, there's a variety of things that we can do. You don't have to go out and hire a map company to. To draw you your own map. We can work with you on, on what you have or what [00:22:00] technologies are already out there.

Bo Shell: We were really lucky that this was a master plan from a master plan document that we were working with. Our paper maps are not set up, top down, they're three quarters. And really we really benefited from having this kind of in our. Archive. But the only reason why we probably would not have gone with the Google, an actual Google map is just because We want to make sure that the buildings are on the piece and some of you may have buildings on your map already the botanical nature of our garden and kind of seeing, oh, I'm near the big tree, you know, that might be helpful, but we really considered just a straight up Google map in the beginning before we realized that this would work so perfectly with our paths.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, and in our end, we can we can try things and if it doesn't work, we scrap it and we go with a different version of it. So we'll try to do the best possible version for you. And then go from there. We had a question [00:23:00] about equipment for setting up the geofencing. So we, the geofencing is all tied by latitude, longitude from a point out and how, Many miles or feet you want from there.

There wasn't geo fencing on site at this point for the garden lights at Atlanta botanical gardens. They once you got on site, it was through the GPS mapping. I don't believe there was any issues in terms of Wi Fi capabilities or service range. Some of you may be more rural than others. So that could come into factor.

But yeah, as long as they have internet, they don't need to download an app. They don't need to do anything really other than, than accessing it.

Bo Shell: Yeah, and, and side note about the garden, like we don't have public Wi Fi. So, and, and not that we, we haven't collected our third wave of research yet that may have some more anecdotals from the research that might say, I could [00:24:00] say I tried the app, but I didn't see my dot moving.

We did not hear that in the first, that's, that's not bubbling to the surface for us now. And that's, you know, 6, people in the same place at the same time.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah,

Bo Shell: perfect.

Casey Loewenthal: And yeah, no, no technology. They don't use beacons or anything. It's all built in the back end of our system with latitude, longitude, feet, miles, however you guys want to say that.

Bo Shell: And before you get too nervous about like latitude, longitude there are a number of websites that you can take your, all of our smartphones or GPS capable, that with the right permissions, you can go to a website anywhere in the world and say, what's the GPS location of where I'm standing right here.

And it gives you those two data points. And then there are a number of ways that you can upload that information to the engaged by cell system as well.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, you don't have to go one by one. You can do it by spreadsheet and load plotted points on there. So we have some ways and working with us, you get [00:25:00] training, you get support, you get help along the way.

So So we'll be there. And that's actually a point I think we might have breezed over that, that Bo is by no means a one man show over at Land of Botanical Gardens, but when I came to this project, Bo took on the reins for, for most of this along with all of his other tasks that he has to do for the day, so if bandwidth is an issue, it, it can be done with a solo solo program but it definitely doesn't have to be, so.

So a question, can you expand? There's no geofencing within the park. They specifically Atlanta Botanical Gardens use geofencing on your arrival process. So there was triggers at 2010 and 5 miles with the playlist with the parking instructions, getting access to the map, but they didn't have the pop ups.

For each exhibit during we did, you didn't have some, we

Bo Shell: did. Yeah, we ended up one of the, the interactivity with the app was the part of the sponsor ask. So once you were in the garden and you were near a popular [00:26:00] photo spot, I mean, again, like we really got, you know, we just scratched the surface with this ability.

Cause our goal was really to get an app from nothing to fully functional for hundreds of thousands of people in three months. So we chose our best features and said, Oh, this tunnel of light is a popular photo spot. So if you had the app up and you approached a tunnel of light or a, an outstanding feature that people often take their photo with, we put a.

Three foot, five foot geo fence around that specific spot inside the garden, so that would ping your phone, but not to be confused with like you, even though you were in the garden, you got your GPS dot that followed you through your experience, and that was without any beacons or a way that I know that this technology has functioned before, but they can do it all based on GPS coordinates.

Okay, perfect.

Casey Loewenthal: There was a question [00:27:00] about maps or directions. It can give you directions with a line of how to navigate to that section, similar to kind of walking directions on a Google map.

Bo Shell: It's going to work a little bit differently depending on your environment that your cultural institution or that your destination is in.

We have a lot of back of house. And we had to check that ourselves to make sure because we didn't want to send anybody back up house and those are Google instructions. So it also depends on, I imagine Casey, like how many of your internal walkways have made it to the Google platform as well. Yeah, that was, that was a little bit limited for us, but, you know, it did work in many ways.

It would just send folks, you know, behind the scenes a little bit.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, absolutely. A question about limitations of the number of geofenced areas. Not in our system. We don't have any sort of [00:28:00] limitation. But the experience of the user, you don't want to have them too close because then there's conflicting overlap of exhibits.

You, as Bo said, some of your more popular highlighted ones you want to have as pop ups. Or if it helps navigate you to an area where you can visually see multiple other places to go. You probably don't need them all to be pop ups because they can navigate. To those areas. But yeah, with, with those large footprint in terms of how large the organization was, they, they were able to space those out.

Bo Shell: And you want to keep your, your guests in the moment as well. You know, make sure that their focus is still on the experience. And that though many of them were buried in their phones anyway. You know, we'll be reporting back to Casey about how this is going to work with our Orca Days exhibition that we have audio tours for but that smaller footprint is something that we're going to be experimenting with in the next few weeks.

Casey Loewenthal: A little bit about the launch. So you wove it into the journey through text message and email. We touched on some of that [00:29:00] digital map marketed it leading up to their arrival and then also on site, you can see some of the signage that they have. Access to our platform can be done QR code.

It could be done through text message with a text message response clickable link from a website. If they're already kind of researching their trip, they can access it that way as we mentioned. No downloads. So makes it easier to get the user in without any of those barriers. And then encourage people through curiosity.

We always mentioned prompting them with a little trivia question with the answer being within the page on the map or having them navigate through the, the site to try and find the answer to the question really piques their interest and gets them into that. And then once they're into the app then they can kind of play around with all the different bells and whistles.

And I think both that's a quote from a be where your audience is makes perfect sense. They're going to have their phone out. They're going to check it. So have them check it the way that you [00:30:00] guys want and get your investors happy.

Outcomes overview. So we got a little bit of metrics on this. So as I mentioned a little bit we had a quick turnaround there was around three months before launch. They had a few soft launches with the investors and I think some members. So we were able to kind of pivot from those Bo built all the content marketing materials and executed the launch himself.

We mentioned how many visitors around 200, 000 or so you mentioned come through in in the three months time, give or take and they had, more than 120, 000 impressions with an audience of 8, 000 to 15, 000 users. And then we mentioned this a little bit is they kind of come as groups, so you don't expect that if it's a family of four, that four members are all going to have their phone out.

They're kind of doing it together. They're showing the kids grandma and grandpa are watching. [00:31:00] So take that into account when it's access. It's that a percentage is not going to be a hundred percent. So we're going to work with kind of a group mentality exposure wise. They have 28, 000 subscribers gained on text message list, and they have also had a.

Text chat component of our platform that allowed Bo to kind of get notifications when users had questions and he was actually able to respond on the fly. And answer them directly. For some of those.

Bo Shell: Fill that in a little bit more Casey, like those who opted into the SMS system at the point of purchase, got a separate notification from their daily email.

That would just direct them back to the app. Like we knew that pointing people to the app at the point in the experience that we wanted them to engage. And we also kind of had a contact us button. If you have a question, then to send a message in, I also single handedly answered these chats. That system was very [00:32:00] simple.

As you know, what cultural institutions, the likelihood that your guest is going to ask you a question that has not been answered elsewhere is very rare. So we wanted to make that information as soon as possible. And, and now that really supports our strategy in the future for the type of information and where we provide that.

To let them know really about changing their tickets was their, was the number one question that we got, but it's very good feedback in the moment and it wasn't entirely overwhelming, so it worked well. Perfect.

Casey Loewenthal: And then Bo shared some information that navigation satisfaction increased for the user experience from the year prior as well as overall satisfaction with accessing the map.

Average 64%. So both follow up with their visitors and getting some of that data was great for us to see as well. So we appreciate that. All right. All right. We are getting close to the [00:33:00] end. I went through the services where you guys have been great about asking questions. Throughout so if you've been holding on to your questions or we missed one it didn't get answered Feel free to throw it in the chat box we're also going to turn on patty who's been hiding in the background Patty is working on our sales team Some of you may have heard from patty after you signed up for the webinar Her checking in making sure you guys got everything you needed if you had any questions you may hear from patty after this or if you have more interest in learning about the platform and how it can work for your organization directly, Patty's contact information is on their phone and email.

Reach out to her. She would love to chat. We just want to show that Patty is a real person. We are not employing AI bots. Patty is real.

Patty Ruland: Hey, Casey. Hey, everybody. I just wanted to pop in real quick. I've seen a ton of familiar names that I know from over the years. Thank you for joining. [00:34:00] Most of you had probably gotten a voicemail message or we chatted yesterday or you got an email from me.

So as promised, you know, we had a, I thought, really exciting session. If you haven't, and maybe Casey, you can scroll back to that slide with the QR code. Like I think Jim did. Go ahead and scan it. It'll save it. You tap the button. It'll save it to your browser. Show it around to the, your colleagues.

See what they think. You know, see if it's something that might work at your venue. We'd love to chat with you like I said, I'll follow up afterwards but if you have any questions in the meantime, go ahead and reach out to me. Also, thanks for bringing all your questions, anything else that Casey or Beau could possibly answer for you right now, go ahead, just put it in the chat window.

Casey Loewenthal: I think Ashley had a question about footprint. We work with organizations [00:35:00] of very small to very large. So it will find what works best. But yeah, we can absolutely work with the smaller footprints.

Any other questions? Throw them in the chat. Let's go up and see if we missed any

question about audio. Yes, we have both audio and GPS. The smartphone tour has both options of audio and GPS mapping as part of it. You can have videos, you can have super quizzes, surveys, polls selfie gallery to take photos.

Bo Shell: Yeah, we barely, we barely, I keep saying it, we barely scratched the surface with the possibilities.

Our education team who's working on is currently working on a scavenger hunt based application specifically, specifically for school teachers who come to the garden with their classes [00:36:00] during the day to make sure that they are providing rich information throughout the experience on their self guided tours.

And then also from a technical perspective, asking about audio and video, the inputs that I worked in for all of the locations were all, we would say, WYSIWYG in the business, what you see is what you get. So kind of a, if you're used to working in WordPress or you have someone on your team, who's administrating a website, it is very likely that they are working primarily with a WYSIWYG box.

A little bit of HTML knowledge helps get the tweaks that you need just to kind of take it over the edge, but if you have a team who's already Doing some pretty expected ground level html work on your wordpress websites or any one of your cms based kind of consumer level mark. I know as a marketing person.

We don't often have the technical information to make html happen, but it's whatever you can imagine in making your website. [00:37:00] You can do your vertical videos. You can do normal videos. I, I embedded a YouTube video of a transformation of our Earth Goddess into Ice Goddess that already existed. It's, it's, it's open ended in that piece as well, in addition to the functionality that's on top of that, that Engage by Cell has.

Casey Loewenthal: Perfect. Answer a few questions. We do have an open API and do integrate with CRMs. We've done it plenty of times. Every organization typically wants a different metric or a different contact point. So reach out to Patty if you want to learn more about the APIs and what it could do, depending on the CRM that you guys have.

Customer service it's not 24 hours, but we are East coast to West coast. So we have a wide range of customer service hours and are responsive. We have a text chat within the backend of our platform. If you have questions, you get a live person during business hours. And we are responsive via phone email and can hop on zoom calls to kind [00:38:00] of walk you guys through the process along with unlimited training on our.

Bo Shell: And a note on my end, we never needed after we launched, I did not call Casey in the middle of the night one time.

Casey Loewenthal: Good to know. I would have answered if you did, but he did not call me. Is it easy to add or modify icons to the map overlay? I'll let Beau answer this one.

Bo Shell: Absolutely. So basically what you're looking at in short and as short as I can make it is kind of like an Excel sheet where you've got your location, your icon, a description and maybe a couple of other you can tag different categories.

And so there is an icon upload button in what kind of looks like an Excel sheet that you just press. We ended up making some SVG icons in Illustrator. We found that that worked best at the different sizing for the different mobile devices. It was literally as simple as, I mean, I just, I made a [00:39:00] daytime map yesterday where I needed to add restroom symbols to restrooms that are open during the day that may not be open at nighttime or water stations matter more during the day than they do in the evening.

And it is a button. Locate the file on your computer, upload, done. And you can do it in bulk as well.

Casey Loewenthal: And and you can easily turn them on or off. So if you do have like weekend events, you could go in with a couple clicks, turn it off. And then next week, turn them back on. So you have full access to shutting individual spots off.

That also comes into account sometimes with areas that are under construction or restrooms that are under maintenance. Certain things that you can turn off. You could even have like a construction icon so people know to not go to those areas or block paths. So yeah, you have full control over all that.

We teach you how to do it. Just like Bo mentioned, he can do it. You can also get help from us to do that as well. Does the amount of people congregating in the area. Affect cell service [00:40:00] or impact needs of the platform. I don't believe so. That would be a situational thing based on what the cell service was.

As Bo mentioned, I don't think that that had an effect at any point that he heard of, but, theoretically, depending on where you are, it could potentially, but

Bo Shell: if you wifi, yeah, if it has wifi, it shouldn't be a problem at all. And then if it's, if it doesn't have wifi and if it is something I know in Atlanta, we get stuck in Atlanta traffic and sometimes it feels like things are moving a little bit slower when you're in the traffic on your mobile device, you're probably limited by that, but we haven't seen any reports of issues with 6, 000 people within.

I mean, the gardens really only 15 acres during the garden lights experience. So it worked.

Casey Loewenthal: Are there in app purchases not from our platform as is we allow you guys to build and things be as open as you want. We do have password protection options that you can do and turn certain pages [00:41:00] on or off or put behind a password protect that theoretically you could charge for if you wanted to.

We have done it in the past and you have like a secret code that once they've paid for it, they enter it in and they get access to the full site. So. It is possible to do some of that. And then we do have scavenger hunts, quizzes, poll surveys, as I mentioned. Purchase items they see through the event lights Bo, do you want to touch on that?

Any do you guys sell the lights at the garden? We do not sell

Bo Shell: the lights at the garden, but that would be something that, you know, our sponsorship team would probably negotiate that could make that work, but certainly like in the application, real world application, you're standing in front of something like our orchestral orbs, which is 110 different forms that are synchronized to music that light with different colors.

We have sold versions of that in our gift shop at [00:42:00] certainly there would be opportunities to say, I'd like something like this at the house. How do I do that? But, but our stuff is, you know, it's bespoke. It's fancy. It's a very fancy experience here. Thanks to our partners that we've worked with along the way.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah technology wise in our platform, you could have a link to the organization that sells the lights and when they're on the site, they could easily click it and bounce to it similar to sponsorships or anything of that sort.

Bo Shell: It's a web page. These, these individual locations on the map, they pop up and it is essentially a self contained web page.

So anything that you can do on the web, I'd be, I'm sure Casey would want to limit me a little bit on that. But like, we haven't had a problem with anything that we've needed to do to achieve within the parameters of Engage by Cell. If you've got a team who can edit a website, then you can, you can do what you need on these [00:43:00] pages.

Casey Loewenthal: We had a question about attendees connecting directly with each other. We do have options for comments. We do have a selfie gallery where people can upload photos. They can go into a live gallery and they can see other users. We do have controls to allow the organization to approve comments or images before they go public.

As we all know, there's a few bad apples when it comes to anything that's public. So they do have those controls, but yeah. You can reply back to other people's comments similar to the end of an article that you read or or like different images as well as sharing the site through your social media and promoting Atlanta Botanical Gardens on your social media as well.

Patty Ruland: And again, Casey, just real quickly. We focus mostly upon the GPS map today, but in our mobile app, there's so many features and capabilities and functions. You know, if you have an online gift shop, we can link to [00:44:00] that. You know, there's just the, the possibilities are literally endless. So if it's something you're interested in, I'll be happy to chat with you about that also too, outside of the.

The GPS map features,

Casey Loewenthal: you can text out coupons, you could have invites, you can have people sign up for memberships. There's a wide variety of things you could do. And as I mentioned a little bit, this was Atlanta botanical gardens. 1st time with garden lights here. But I know those already been thinking about what we could do differently next year, which we're excited to see.

Bo Shell: In the daytime map I built yesterday, it's very much, there's a lot of, there's a lot of really interesting questions about the creativity that you can get with Engage by Cell, but I think there are just as many people out there at smaller institutions that are saying, well, we don't have the bandwidth to do that, and I don't always have the bandwidth to build something from start to finish in the amount of time, so I created essentially a new platform yesterday that's linking to our existing [00:45:00] content on our website.

We do want to build that out more with putting the right information in front of the guest within the mobile experience, but for our members, you know, we want to promote membership more than anything. So, you know, we made an icon for membership. Described a little bit of the benefits and said, learn more and then sent them to the link that already exists on our website.

So there's there's so much that's built in. But you don't have to do it all. And you don't have to recreate any wheels that you already have. I mean, the GPS technology is the most unique and interesting quality for what we needed. But we didn't have to, to redo a lot of stuff as much as we did. We could have pointed more to our existing content.

Casey Loewenthal: Cameron, question. Could the information icons labels in the system be translated automatically? Yes, I'd say about 90 percent can all [00:46:00] be translated certain things is text within an image and certain map plotted points that are specifically on Google map cannot be translated, but once they tap the marker, the pop up can translate some of that content.

And as. You saw on the side bow and then we had a little toggle from English to Spanish to make it easy, but it can also be a drop down with a customized menu of up to 120 different languages

Bo Shell: that can, can be updated. And we started that way. And then we said, you know, we really focusing on these two.

This is what our research tells us that we need to do. We didn't love how the dropdown looked and said, Hey Casey, can your team. Make this a little bit more seamless and within a day. It was like, again, it's magic.

Casey Loewenthal: Morgan, another one of our favorites [00:47:00] from Missouri Botanical. She posted the link to their site in the chat if you guys want to click that. They have been awesome clients of ours and. And helped us create certain things within our system based on their feedback, just like Bow and Atlanta Botanical Gardens did.

So their site's

Bo Shell: great. Thank you on our behalf, Morgan, as well. I cannot say, you know, we're, the Botanical Garden is a small, the community is pretty small. And I have to say that we were a bit inspired by the work that you and your team had already done. So thank you for, for that.

Casey Loewenthal: Yeah,

Bo Shell: absolutely.

Casey Loewenthal: Spread the word. All right. Well, we have hit our time. We have a few more minutes. If there's any last questions, but if any of you are hopping off, I just want to thank everybody for joining us today. Thank you both for sharing your time and your experience. It's valuable to us. [00:48:00] We know how much we love our platform, but from hearing it from others and letting you guys ask questions to someone in the industry we really appreciate it.

So thank you Bo and thanks for everybody for attending and our team for getting this all set up.

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