Member maps are awesome... they give your members a way to visualize the growth of their community. I've shared many ways of building member maps over the years, but I seem to be getting a lot of questions about it lately so I figured it was time for an update. Today I am going to show you the most rapid method for creating a member map that I have found to date. If you know of a faster way, please share. Here are a few of my previous posts:
How to Map Your Members on a Ning Network
3.0 Tip: How To Map Your Ning Network Members -Updated-
3.0 Mapping Tip: Make Your Member Map Responsive
Here is the short version of how I do it now:
I use the Geocode Awesome addon for Google Drive.
Export your member data from your community as CSV
Import it into Google Drive and open it as spreadsheet with addon installed to sheets
- i usually make a copy of the memberdata.csv and name it GEOmemberdata and strip the email column out and other irrelevant columns the geocode the geo copy..
Combine the Location column with Country to create a new cell called "Full Address" in the sidebar (it will do it for you)
Geocode that column - it will generate two new columns for Latitude and Longitude and may take as much as an hour
NOTE: While it geocodes your locations, leave the page open and do not switch to a new tabs to do other things....let it run... if you have a lot of members, watch a movie while it runs or it will stop and hang...best to use in Chrome
Then you'll be presented with an option to create a heat map from the sheet and you have two choices
1) Either export the sheet as a CSV file to import into other map platforms like Carto.com or Mapbox
2) Generate your map using Awesome table...
Either one you choose, you'll want to edit the HTML of the infobox.
I usually export the CSV file first before generating the heatmap because it adds extra filters to the sheet when you generate the map.. I do this so that I can import the CSV into Carto.com to create a more robust map like this:
I hope this helps with you member mapping questions. If you ever need advise or help with any aspect of your community, simply drop me a line here and we'll get it moving in the right direction, together... Have a great weekend!
Replies