View and assess your project’s contacts by location on a map.
View all your people on a map
- Start by clicking the Maps link on the navigation panel.
- Clicking this link takes you to Broadstripes’ Maps page. By default, you’ll see the location of every contact in your project pinpointed on the map that appears.
- You can change the way contacts are marked by clicking the blue buttons in the left-hand panel: markers, dots or heat.
- You can hide all these contacts from appearing on the map by clicking again on the selected marker type (markers, dots, or heat) to deselect it.
- For a better look, you can zoom in or out using the zoom controls on the left-hand side of the map, or with the plus and minus keys on your keyboard.
View your people with a search
Running a search from the maps page will find a specific group of contacts according to any criteria you choose — then display them on the map.
For this example, we’ll use the map to decide where to start a card drive. We’ll run a search to find where the highest density of unsigned cards is, and target that area first.
- We’ll start by running a recent search for everyone in our project who hasn’t yet signed a card. (Learn more about creating custom searches like this in the Create and save a search article).
- After running our “unsigned card” search, the map now shows an additional group of contacts, indicated by purple dots. By default, each search is given its own color, and the results are layered over what was already displayed on the map (unless you choose to hide a group of contacts, as explained above).
- If we want to see just the contacts in the “unsigned card” search, we can hide the other contacts (explained above) or remove them from the map by clicking the icon.
- Once you are seeing only the contacts you need, clicking markers can be especially useful for seeing the highest number of contacts in an area at a glance.
- After deciding where to start my card drive, I can use Broadstripes’ driving directions feature to help me get house-by-house directions for my visits. Read the Get driving directions for your list article for more help.
View people using shapes and shape groups
Another useful way to see a group of contacts by their location is using the shapes feature. A shape is an area of the map that collects groups of people inside saved, user-defined boundaries.
- Start by clicking the Shape Groups drop-down menu in the upper left-hand corner of the map.
- Choose the shape group you want displayed on the map by checking it.
- The map will instantly display all the shapes in the selected shape group.
- Each shape is defined by an outline and a unique color. To get detailed information about the people located inside a shape, just hover over the map and click anywhere in the shape.
- You can learn more about shapes in the Working with shapes article.