From CampusBird Blog

Ole Miss Relies on CampusBird’s Interactive Map Platform to Help Make Commencement a Success

Commencement prep makes for a busy time of year. So many details to make sure the events run smoothly and that the hundreds – or perhaps thousands – of visitors can easily find their way to and around your campus on this special day.

There’s one thing that should not be an additional worry, and that’s your interactive campus map. If you and your colleagues are spending hours updating a static map, having graphic designers create special commencement day maps, or slowly sending maps around department by department to double check accuracy, we’re happy to let you know that CampusBird provides a better, easier way. Our clients depend on CampusBird every year because it’s easy and requires little work.

One of the major benefits of CampusBird is that once you’ve created a commencement layer, you can save it and reuse it, year after year. So unless you have new changes to make (a different entrance to be used, construction, new parking lot, etc.) your saved CampusBird commencement layer can be live (and shareable with a specific link) in seconds. And if you have updates to make, with CampusBird’s zero coding content management system, it won’t take you long to make any necessary updates.

Here’s how Ole Miss uses CampusBird to highlight important commencement locations and information on their interactive campus map:

  • Information booths: Because no matter how much information you provide online, people will still have questions. 
  • Line up locations: Specific student line up information by college / school. Students can easily find the location online, and using the CampusBird pinpoints, administrators can include important information e.g. “Doctoral candidate line up location. Please report to the location indicated for your degree program no later than 8:30am on Saturday, May 14.”  
  • Parking – Of course, parking! With the commencement layer you can highlight ADA accessible parking lots, and now with CampusBird’s just announced live parking feed data, map users can see real-time parking lot occupancy indicated by color-coding.
  • Refreshments: Easily highlight the locations of refreshment locations, hours of operation and menu items.
  • Restrooms: Important!

  • Shuttle stops: Are you using parking lots off campus and shuttling visitors to and from? Highlight these locations (and provide in-depth detail) right on your map. Ole Miss is using CampusBird to display on-campus shuttle service to assist people with disabilities and the elderly. CampusBird shuttle stop points can indicate pick-up and drop-off locations, phone numbers and other contact information for commencement day assistance, and other information.
  • Inclement weather location: While you hope never to use it, being able to communicate your inclement weather location can save a lot of hassle for campus visitors.
  • CampusBird’s MapTimer lets you schedule the commencement overlay so that it goes live a few days before, and ends the day after (or whenever you choose). That saves you or your colleagues time…on a Saturday or Sunday…to log in and update the map so it’s back to normal on Monday morning.

A dedicated commencement layer is just one example of how CampusBird helps transform your online campus experience, making it easy to create, manage, share and promote location-based information to students, staff, parents, alumni and visitors.