Guidebook

Official JCC App Launched!

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:58:00 -0700

We’re excited to announce that JCCs across the country now have a mobile app! The JCC app is available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. This means that JCC members all over the continent have a go-to place to find detailed calendars, schedules, and other information to help them engage with their local center, as well as interactive features to help members network and communicate.

Here are some of the features of the JCC guides in the app:

Cultural calendars
Fitness schedules
Program information
Social sharing features
Feedback surveys and polls

Learn more about taking your JCC mobile!

How to Build A Great Mobile Orientation App

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:52:00 -0700

Increasingly, schools are turning to mobile apps for their orientations and campus events. There are, however, several important factors to consider when deciding to take your event mobile, including cost, time frame, and features. In our white paper, “What to Consider When Deciding on a School Orientation or Campus Event App,” we give you a concise overview of the major issues that you should consider.

Our white paper covers several important topics including:

Reasons to take your campus events mobile
How much you should expect to pay
How much time you can expect to invest in building an app
How to turn your app into a revenue generator
How taking your event mobile saves money and the environment
What types of campus events benefit from mobile guides
Sample use cases and examples

We hope that reading our white paper inspires you to take your next campus event mobile and gives you ideas on how to get started! Download our free white paper here.

What are the Best Conference and Event Apps Out There?

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:54:00 -0700

So you’re planning a big event and it’d be awesome to have an app. You begin to envision its functionality and get excited about potential features: an interactive venue map, a personalized scheduler, exhibitor listings, easy social sharing, increased visibility for sponsors, maybe even a user survey or two. Great! Things are progressing. All you need now is to choose a mobile event app company.

Search “best mobile event app makers” on Google and companies like Guidebook, Quickmobile, Eventmobi, Crowdcompass, Bloodhound, and Grupio appear near the top of the page. But which will produce the best app given your tight budget and goals? The answer is elusive. Unfortunately, most event app companies don’t post their prices nor offer an honest appraisal of their features online. And with so many variables and a ton of companies vying for your business, suddenly picking a provider is looking a lot more daunting than you had originally imagined. To make an informed decision, you’ll of course need to know what functionality each supports and what each solution costs. In addition, you’ll want to ask:

Are the apps all equally good-looking and easy to use?
Can you build a basic app for free?
What about tweaking content if something comes up last minute — is that easy?
Will the app work well on all devices including tablets, phones, and laptops?
Will you be able to tell how many people are downloading and using your app?

To eliminate a bit of this time-consuming market research, we’ve made a chart (above) to help you more easily compare leaders in the event app space. We hope it helps you narrow options and more quickly choose the best mobile app solution for your event.

It’s important to note that mobile is a fast-evolving industry, so don’t just take our word for the data. We encourage you to pick out three companies that seem to offer what you need at the best price and request a live demo with each.

Two other things bear mentioning which are impossible to include in a chart, but are nonetheless really important: app usability and customer support. It would be unfair for us to give you our thoroughly biased judgments of different apps’ aesthetics or companies’ customer support teams. However, we can’t emphasize enough how important it is to test drive a few apps and feel out their customer support before signing a contract. You don’t want to find out too late that your app, while functional, is poorly designed and crashes a lot. And you definitely don’t want to be left hanging when you’re trying to fix something.

We hope this research will save you some time, but at the end of the day, there’s no better way to make a decision than to see a few apps in action and get custom quotes.

If you want a live demo of Guidebook, sign up here!

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* $ vs. $$ vs. $$$

These figures offer a ballpark estimate for the cost of an “average” event app. While a single provider’s pricing can vary greatly based on specific features, number of attendees, device compatibility, and overall customization, a typical event app is defined as: a single-event, branded solution with robust basic features (map, scheduler, social sharing, etc.) and some additional functionality. Not bare bones, but not every bell and whistle either. “$” denotes a range from about $0 - $5,000, “$$” a range from about $5,000 - $7,000, and “$$$” above $7,000.

*Sponsor Visibility

This feature that allows you to create ads or banners within your app to showcase event sponsors. Sponsors see tremendous value in this increased visibility, and therefore this feature may prove helpful during the sponsor courting process.

*Gamification

Gamification is any in-app feature that allows attendees to compete with one another. While the details of each “game” vary and may even be customizable, imagine awarding attendees virtual “points” for completing certain tasks, crowning a winner, and recognizing them in some fashion. While in theory this sounds cool, it has the potential to distract from the core purpose of your event. A mobile event app is an incredibly useful tool, but not the main event at your conference. So assess the tradeoff between cool/fun and distracting, and be careful not to over-incentivize your attendees to stay glued to their screens.

*Nested App

If you go to the app store and download (for example) “Company X’s Tech Conference App”, you are downloading a native app. If, on the other hand, you go to the app store and download (for example) the “Guidebook” app, proceed to open it, search for “Company X’s Tech Conference App” within the Guidebook app, and open it, you are viewing Company X’s nested app. Nested Apps are cheaper, equally customizable, and offer all the same interactive functionality as native apps. The only difference is that your app is housed within another app that attendees must initially download from the app store. Lacking a presence of their own in the App store, nested apps may appear slightly less branded than native apps. But if you’re looking for a cheap, and still fully functional solution, nested apps are a great way to go.

*Free Basic Package

Does the company offer a free—not a free trial, but a truly free!—way to build and publish an event app with basic features?

Guidebook Goes To Toronto!

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:47:00 -0700

Last weekend, Guidebook sponsored and exhibited at the 33rd annual Association of Collegiate Conference and Events Directors-International (ACCED-i) Conference in Toronto! Over 1,750 members from 500 colleges and universities attended to discuss themes in the design, marketing, coordination and planning of conferences and special events on campuses around the world.

The Guidebook app allowed attendees to create personal itineraries for the three-day event, as well as view important conference information and interact with organizations’ social media outlets. Everyone at the conference couldn’t stop talking about how much they loved having everything they needed to know right in the palms of their hands!

Many of the attendees stopped by the Guidebook booth to preview the app for college events on iPads and tablets, enter to win prizes, or play Bananagrams with Guidebook representative (and Bananagrams world champion), Katie Williams.

Katie also gave a presentation at a special interest program on how universities are leveraging the power of mobile technology to improve how they run campus events. The theme of the session was common mistakes event organizers make when incorporating apps into their events, and the main takeaways are as follows:

1) Keep event apps simple

2) Make sure to promote your app

3) Don’t be afraid to go paperless

4) Find a content management system that is user-friendly

As a partner of ACCED-I, Guidebook is looking forward to exciting new developments in the world of mobile technology for school events!

How Amazon Impressed its Developers with Guidebook’s Mobile Event App

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:07:00 -0700

At Amazon’s last big developer conference, AWS re:Invent, most of the developers in attendance used Guidebook to find their way around and interact with the conference organizers. More than 6,000 attendees from 62 countries attended the three-day conference for technical bootcamps, guest speakers and educational sessions. As the official conference app, Guidebook made it easy for attendees to navigate more than 150 sessions, create their own personalized schedules, and even participate in a series of “Code Challenges” via the app.

According to Tracy Laxdal, Marketing Manager, Amazon: “Our attendees are very tech savvy, and their most common comment was ‘this app is extremely polished.’ From an implementation standpoint, the app was easy to configure and the Guidebook team was great to work with.”

Read more about the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference success story. Or you can check out more of Guidebook’s testimonials and customer success stories!

Guidebook at the Meeting Professionals International Trade Show

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:23:00 -0800

Katherine, our Business Development Manager, shares her experience at the 2013 Meeting Professionals International (MPI) Trade Show, put on by the Northern California Chapter.

A week or so ago, I had the pleasure of representing Guidebook at a trade show put on by the Northern California Chapter of Meeting Professionals International.

Pretty much everyone at Guidebook tries to go to events whenever they can – in addition to meeting people, it’s nice to see the challenges of event organizers, attendees, and exhibitors firsthand. There were over 1,000 attendees there and at least a couple hundred exhibitors. As an attendee, it was clear what the main benefits of a mobile app would be for a show of this size.

First, just trying to find a particular vendor or booth is much easier with a searchable vendor directory and corresponding floor map. There were several long rows of vendors.

Information on transportation, parking, and dining options is also a big plus. The event was at Moscone Center (San Francisco’s convention center) and all of us who went were Bay Area residents. Nonetheless, the center is enormous and finding the right parking structure, and locating the correct building (there are several sections) were tough tasks.

And of course an interactive listing of the sessions and speakers is always useful, so that people can pick the sessions that interest them and create a personalized agenda.

We will be attending the Exhibitor Show in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks, and hopefully many similar shows in the next couple of months. If you know of a show that we should check out (or create an app for) let us know.

Guidebook Has Partnered with the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority (RSCVA)!

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 14:56:00 -0800

Check out the Trade Show News Network blog’s feature on Guidebook’s partnership with the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority (RSCVA). The RSCVA is a marketing organization responsible for promoting tourism and attracting visitors to events, such as conventions, trade shows, and business meetings, that are held in Reno, Nevada.

Now, with the partnership, all events that register through RSCVA will be provided with a free mobile event app, powered by Guidebook. Recently, the Safari Club International (SCI) Convention used Guidebook for its 41st anniversary in Reno, allowing visitors to conveniently navigate the event on their smartphones and tablets. SCI event organizers were pleased with the download rate and reported extremely positive feedback from attendees.

Feel free to contact us to learn more about our partnership opportunities.

Announcing Guidebook’s Partnership with NISOD

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:16:00 -0800

Check out a press release on Guidebook’s partnership with the University of Texas at Austin’s National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD). The NISOD — which has almost 500 member colleges — is a membership organization dedicated to the professional development of staff and the improvement of teaching and student learning.

With the introduction of the Guidebook app, NISOD conference attendees will now be able to access up-to-date schedules, maps, and session information. Read the full press release below.

“AUSTIN, Texas – January 31, 2013 – The University of Texas at Austin’s National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Guidebook, Inc., to develop a mobile device application that will allow users to customize and organize their NISOD conference experience.

The application, which will be free, can be used on Apple and Android-based smartphones as well as tablets. It should be available in early April.

With the NISOD mobile app, users will get:

instantly updated session schedules
ability to create personalized agendas which will include reminders about upcoming sessions
an interactive to-do list
exhibitor listings and descriptions
speaker listing and descriptions
Austin Convention Center maps
shared photo albums that will allow users to instantly upload photos and post them for others to see
social media access from within the app

“We know that mobile apps are the future and we look forward to helping our conference attendees adopt the Guidebook NISOD app,” said Dr. Larry Miller, NISOD director. “However, there will still be a printed schedule and plenty of on-site assistance at the conference.”

NISOD is a membership organization that focuses on professional development and support for community, technical and junior colleges. Nearly 500 member colleges benefit from NISOD events and activities that ultimately enhance teaching and learning.

Guidebook, Inc., is the leading national developer of mobile applications for large scale events.

This year’s NISOD conference will be held May 26-29 in Austin, Texas.

For more information, contact: Larry Miller, director@nisod.org, 512-232-1430.”

To learn more about using Guidebook for your next event, check out our events page or register for a free demo.

*Image courtesy of www.nisod.org.

Guidebook at the 2013 AAC&U Conference

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:19:00 -0800

Katie, one of our account executives, shares her experience at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Conference.

Last week, Guidebook was the official app for the annual Association of American Colleges and Universities conference, hosted at the beautiful Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Over 1,600 deans, presidents, professors, and university staff attended the event, and over 5,200 people downloaded the Guidebook App!

The conference brought together leaders in higher education to discuss important issues — such as globalization, technology, demographics, and the relationship between politics and education — that colleges in the U.S. are facing today. Guidebook enabled participants to navigate seamlessly through three action-packed days of educational sessions, networking events, receptions, workshops and forums.

Users enjoyed the ability to add schedule sessions to personalized agendas, view venue maps of the Hyatt floor plans, browse local restaurants and points of interest in the Atlanta area, and connect with other attendees through the registrant list. Best of all, the app allowed the conference organizers to save money and the environment by printing fewer paper agendas!

As colleges and universities seek new ways to offer the highest quality education in a rapidly changing technological environment, mobile apps provide an economic and sustainable way for them to effectively communicate with their students and staff. Many attendees were impressed by the functionality of the Guidebook App and were inspired to investigate ways to implement the tool for events on their own campuses.

To learn more about how you can use Guidebook for your own events, register for a demo or visit our events page.

Check Out Our Customer Success Story on the Smart Jewelry Show!

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:44:00 -0800

We want to share a series of customer success stories on clients who built standout guides and were happy with their Guidebook experience. Let’s start off with the 2012 Smart Jewelry Show guide, which served over 2,500 independent retail jewelers and 550 exhibitors. To read the full story, click here!

This guide stands out because it makes creative use of the features that we offer. In addition to giving attendees the basics — schedules, maps, speakers, and exhibitor lists — the Smart Jewelry Show guide has several unique features that helped keep attendees connected and engaged. For instance, attendees could use the:

Share Spot and Satisfaction Survey to rate their overall experience, share feedback on their favorite vendors & products, and offer suggestions for improvement;
Show News module to check out tips and trends for buyers, and see snapshots of vendors’ offerings;
Show Specials to view special deals and discounts available exclusively to Smart Show attendees;
Smart Stations for educational workshops on holiday marketing ideas, social media marketing strategies, and more.

To make sure that attendees would take advantage of their awesome guide, event organizers promoted the guide with a nice infographic on their website (below).

You can read what the Smart Jewelry Show organizers had to say here.

According to Cindy Chandler, the Manager of Education and Sponsorships at SmartWork Media: “We wanted our guide to be simple, sharp and representative of our company. To accommodate our diverse group of attendees, we wanted to make our guide streamlined and easy-to-use, but at the same time, sharp enough to dazzle the tech savvy. Guidebook was the perfect fit!”

Feel free to contact us request a demo, or to learn more about Guidebook!

*Image courtesy of Smart Jewelry Show.

Managing the Calendar or Schedule in Your Ongoing Guide Using Google Calendar

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:50:51 -0800

Lauren, one of our customer success associates, shares tips and tricks on managing your calendar or schedule in your ongoing guide using Google calendar.

Do you want to have an automatically updating schedule or calendar of events in your Guidebook mobile guide? Now, you can use Google Calendar to set this up for free and with little effort!

This is a common request among many of the organizations that have ongoing mobile guides, including community centers and schools. When these organizations manage their schedule data by entering it into a software database, it is usually possible to connect the content with Guidebook’s content management system, Gears, without any duplication of effort.

But many organizations don’t have the luxury of a good database. We have found that Google Calendar – a simple, free solution – is a great alternative for organizations that do not have designated data-syncing programs.1. Setting up Google Calendar

You can create a stand-alone Google Calendar account, here.

If you’re familiar with Google Calendar, feel free to start building your calendar. You can refer to section 5 of this article for directions to connect your feed. Otherwise, continue reading for instructions on how to create a new event, how to edit old events, and how Google Calendar syncs with Gears.

2. Creating a New Calendar

Note: The name that you give your calendar will be the calendar’s name in your guide. Therefore, you may want to create new calendars for the purposes of your guide.

To create a new calendar, look to the left side of your screen, and click on the down arrow next to “My Calendars.” Click on “Create New Calendar.”

A new page will appear. Fill out the form and save it.

If you want your schedule broken into tracks in your guide, you will need to create separate calendars for each track.

Note: You need to make the calendar public so that we can pull from the feed. This does not mean that your Google Calendar will be open to the public, or that anyone can edit it.

3. Creating a New Event

Click on the day you want an event to start. You can either fill out the information in the box that pops up, or click on “Edit event” to add more information (i.e. location, repetition and descriptions).

4. Repeating Events

Google Calendar allows you to repeat an event at different time intervals. On the event creation page, click the “Repeat” button located under the time and date sections. Choose a time interval and duration.

5. Getting the Feed into Gears

Putting the feed into Gears is something that has to be done on our end.

Simply send us the URL of your iCal feed. To find this, navigate to your Google Calendar home page, click on the gear in the top right corner, and choose settings.

In the top menu bar, click on “Calendars” and click on the calendar that you need the feed for.

You should see several feed links under “Calendar Addresses.” Click the green “iCAL” feed. Copy the URL and email it to us at support@guidebook.com. Make sure you include your guide name and the where you want each calendar to appear in your guide.

Hopefully, this article helps you manage your calendar with less work! If you have any additional questions or comments, please email support@guidebook.com.

Guidebook for iPad

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:40:36 -0800

We’re excited to announce that Guidebook for iPad is now available. The iPad version of Guidebook is something that has been requested more than almost anything else, both from users and our own staff. It took a long time to get here, but that’s only because we wanted to make sure we built it right. We hope it was worth the wait. Check it out!

Why Guidebook for Places?

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:04:00 -0800

Check out our latest in-house production! Our new video showcases Guidebook for places, and gives you a two-minute overview of what Guidebook can do to keep your visitors informed and engaged with what’s going on around them.

Guidebook is all about connecting people with places, and keeping valuable information at people’s fingertips. We can create guides for any place you can think of – from community centers and museums to amusement parks and shopping centers.

Do you want to offer your visitors a mobile guide? We can help. To request a demo, please click here. If you’d like to learn more about what Guidebook has to offer, check out our informative places page!

Check Out Our Support Site: Get Instant Answers to Your Questions!

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:16:00 -0800

We recently launched our support site to answer questions that we get from customers and users. Although our customer success team is always quick to respond to support tickets, they’ve noticed that they often get the same questions. To save their time and yours, we’ve created a support knowledge base with close to 140 articles (and counting) that you can use to get immediate answers to your questions. We thought we’d give you a quick rundown of the support site to make sure that you know how to take advantage of this valuable resource.

The support site is divided into four sections: Frequently Asked Questions, Glossary, Tips and Best Practices, and Troubleshooting. The FAQ section has answers to basic questions, and is broken down into several sub-categories, including “General,” “Guide Building,” “Pricing,” and “Publishing,” for easy navigation. Look here if, for instance, you want to find out how to make your guide private, or where to check your download rate.

The Glossary contains definitions of terms that often show up in our content management system, Gears, or in our support articles. Glossed terms that appear in our support articles are always linked to their definitions.

The articles in the Tips and Best Practices section offer helpful tips and tricks to make your guide-building process as smooth as possible. We have several articles on schedules, which is one of the topics we most frequently get questions about. We also have a “Getting Started On Your Guide” tutorial that takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a guide.

The Troubleshooting section offers in-depth articles that are designed to help you resolve any problems you encounter while using Gears. We have articles, for instance, that will help you figure out what an error message on Gears means, or how to locate your guide within the Guidebook app.

So let’s say you have a specific question on importing excel spreadsheets to Gears, and you’re not sure which section to look in. You can simply type your question into the search bar at the top of the page.

Once you hit the “search” button, a list of results will be generated, with the articles arranged in order of relevance. In this case, the first hit, “Importing a schedule from a spreadsheet (Excel or CSV),” is your best option.

You can see that this article takes you step-by-step through the process of importing a spreadsheet. There are screenshots to guide you along, and, in this case, a detailed instructional video that you can follow along with.

At the bottom of the article, you can “vote” if you found the article helpful, and leave a comment if you have any feedback.

To return to the homepage, click on “Have a Question” at the top of the page.

At any point, while you’re browsing, you can click on the blue “Support” tab to the right for easy access to the search bar. In the pop-up window that appears, you can type in your question and hit the “search” button. You will see a list of relevant articles.

If, however, you can’t find the answer that you’re looking for, you can simply click on the “None of these are helpful - get in touch” button at the bottom of the pop-up. Fill out the form and hit “submit” to send us a support ticket.

We are always looking to improve, so we’d love to hear your feedback on the support site. We’re planning on putting links to relevant support articles directly in each Gears module — this way, you never have to leave Gears to get answers to your questions. Let us know what you think!

Check Out One of Our New Features: Linking!

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:02:00 -0800

Andrew, one of our customer support associates, shares one of Guidebook’s new features.

The holiday season may be nearing its end, but we promise that Guidebook is a gift that keeps on giving! Users may have already noticed that the hard-working Guidebook Gears development team has rolled out an incredibly useful new feature: linking templates. Users have often used the linking feature to connect speakers with events or sponsors with speakers, or even to highlight related sessions for attendees. It’s one of our most popular features, and we want to make sure that our users know how to use it.

Linking used to be a somewhat time-consuming process, especially if you had hundreds or even thousands of custom list items and sessions to link. Now, after uploading your schedules and custom lists, you can download a template from Guidebook Gears just for linking.

By simply filling out the names of each session or item you want to link, you can populate a spreadsheet in far less time than it would take to manually link sessions, one by one. If there are multiple sessions or items with the same name, you can export your spreadsheets and then copy and paste the numerical IDs from your spreadsheets.

The new linking template may take a bit of setup, but we’re confident that the template will be much easier and faster to use when all is said and done. You no longer need to click endlessly for hundreds of speakers and sessions — just fill out a template and upload. It’s that easy. Happy holidays!

To get a more in-depth look at linking, check out our support article!

Why Guidebook?

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 11:37:00 -0800

Check out our new video to get a two-minute overview of why you should use Guidebook for your next event! It’s homemade, so we’re pretty proud of it.

To request a demo, please click here. Or, if you’d like to get a more in-depth look at both the advantages and challenges of offering a mobile app for your event, check out our white paper here!

Timeline for Building a Guide from Start to Finish

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 15:35:00 -0800

Using Guidebook to create a mobile guide is an easy, straightforward process that should take no more than a few hours once you’ve gathered all the information you need to populate your guide. It is a good idea, however, to figure out what each step entails so that you can allot your time properly.

We’ve created presentations that go through the step-by-step process of creating a guide from start to finish, whether you are working on your own or with a member of our customer success team. Check out the do-it-yourself version here, and the customer success version here!

Here is a brief overview of the timeline of building a guide:

1) Register: To get started, you need to register with Guidebook.

2) Demo: Once you register, you can choose to setup a demo with a member of our sales team. They will walk you through a demo guide, and show you all of our features. This is a good time to figure out which plan you want based on your budget and needs, and to start looking for sponsors (which can not only help you recoup the cost of building a guide, but also generate additional revenue).

3) If you’re building your guide on your own:

a) Draft: Although we have had people build guides from start to finish in as little as a few days, we always recommend that you start building your guide 1-2 months before your event’s start date. This is a good time to think about what features you want to use, and test them out in our content management system Gears.

If you are working with a member of our customer success team:

b) Outline: Come up with an outline that includes the features you want, as well as important deadlines for when you want your guide to be completed, published, etc. Once you’ve come up with an outline, give your customer success associate a few days to get back to you with a shell draft of what your guide will look like.

4) Collect Data: To save time, try to gather all the data you will need to populate your guide 1-2 months before your event’s start date. This includes schedule information, images, maps, etc. You can always make changes to your guide later.

5) Publish Your Guide: It is a good idea to publish your guide 2 weeks before your event’s start date. This gives you ample time to tweak your guide and make any necessary changes.

6) Promote Your Guide: We offer promotional materials such as posters and email templates that you can customize to help get the word out about your guide. It’s a good idea to start promoting your guide 2 weeks in advance.

7) Event: Make sure you set up posters around the registration area, and tell all your attendees about your guide. You can also opt for on-site support if you would like a member of our customer success team at your event, helping promote your guide and teaching attendees how to it.

8) Metrics: After your event, you can look at your guide’s download rate, feedback, and ratings. Your metrics can help you figure out how to improve your event for next year.

Another good resource that goes more in-depth into the process of creating a guide is our “Getting Started Guide,” which you can check out here. Hopefully, this helps you map out the guide-building process!

New Features in Gears 2 – Creating a Mobile Guide Just Got Easier!

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:03:00 -0800

Over the past year, we have gotten a lot of customer feedback on how to improve our content management system, Gears. For the past few months, our developers have worked extremely hard to make Gears even more intuitive and easy-to-use. We’re excited to finally announce the release of Gears 2!

We’ve added several new features that will greatly enhance the user experience. To check out all of the changes, log in to your Gears account or register for a free account.

We want to highlight a few of the exciting changes we’ve made!

Navigate Your Guide with Ease

We streamlined the overall layout of Gears to make the process of navigating from one section of the guide to the next as seamless as possible.

The handy progress bar in the upper right hand corner helps you keep your place in your guide, and track your progress.

Customize the Look and Feel of Your Guide with Drag and Drop Editing

With our new drag and drop layout, you can add and remove features from your guide at the click of a button. This layout also makes it easy to rearrange the order of your icons.

Check out our tutorial for more information on how to reorder your icons.

Link Speakers to Sessions

One of our most exciting new features is linking. You can now link sessions to any custom list items in your guide. For instance, if you have multiple speakers that each have their own bio pages within the guide, you can link their bios to the schedule listings of the sessions they are presenting at. Similarly, you can link sponsors to descriptions of their booths. This makes it much easier for users to navigate your guide.

Check out our tutorial for a more in-depth explanation of linking!

Add Google Maps Locations to Custom Lists

You can now add Google Maps Locations to custom lists. For instance, if you have a special session that is being held at a different venue, you can easily type in the address of your additional venue and pin the location on Google Maps. All guides have the ability to set Google Maps locations for custom list items as long as they have a valid “Venue” address filled in.

Allow Attendees to Give You Feedback on Every Session

You can now set up per session feedback, which allows your attendees to give you feedback on individual sessions (as opposed to the entire guide). You can ask your attendees questions in a variety of formats such as multiple choice, free response, and sliding scale. This is a great way for you to evaluate how popular different sessions are and to figure out what types of sessions to include for future events.

Upgrade Your Plan Right from Gears

We wanted to make it more evident which of our features are paid features that require you to upgrade your plan. Now, if you want to add a paid feature, a pop up will appear, informing you that while you are free to test out this feature, you will need to upgrade your plan before you can publish your guide.

If you opt to upgrade your plan, you can do it right from Gears. All you have to do is click on the feature you want to add, and enter your payment information. This saves you the time and trouble of having to contact our sales team just to upgrade your guide.

Check out our tutorial for a more details on creating a guide.

Let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your feedback on Gears 2 and any suggestions you have for further improvement! Feel free to drop us a line at contact@guidebook.com.

Check Out Our Favorite Guides: Cherry Creek Arts Festival

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:37:00 -0700

Guidebook started out offering event guides for conferences, conventions, and trade shows. Over the past year, however, we have expanded beyond event guides and started offering comprehensive guides for schools and community centers as well. To give you a better idea of the scope of guides we offer, we thought we’d highlight a few standout guides in a series of blog posts.

The Cherry Creek Arts Festival (CCAF) guide is a great example of a guide that is both visually appealing and user friendly. The CCAF is a three-day cultural arts festival that attracts 350,000 visitors every year. For an event of this size and nature, a mobile guide is essential in that it helps attendees plan out their schedules and make the most of their festival experience.

One of the CCAF guide’s main strengths is its organization. Information on different types of artists (visual, culinary, and performing) is organized in separate folders with custom icons. Within each folder, artists are arranged by booth and type. Visitors can easily find out where their favorite artists are located, what they are selling, and even check out links to their websites. The guide also includes a special Kids’ Activities section, which is a great addition for this family-friendly festival.

Another thing that sets the CCAF guide apart is its creative use of our photo album feature. The “Art Galleries” section gives visitors a fun way to browse photos of the artwork being exhibited at the festival. Different types of artwork are organized in folders according to medium (i.e. digital art, glass, jewelry) to keep the gallery easy to navigate.

The CCAF guide also takes advantage of our feedback section. This frequently overlooked feature provides a great way for event organizers to garner valuable insights about their event. Questions such as the ones CCAF asked (“What motivated you to attend our event?”, “What areas of the festival did you visit?” and “How much money did you spend at the festival”) can help event organizers improve their events in the future.

To check out the rest of the Cherry Creek Arts Festival guide, visit http://guidebook.com/g/cherryarts/. Stay tuned for the next installment in this series!

Tips and Tricks for Excel: Sort a Custom List By Last Name instead of First Name!

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:02:00 -0700

Here’s a post about how to sort a speaker list, exhibitor list, or any other custom list/directory in Guidebook. We’re going to show you how to do it through the example of putting a speaker list in alphabetical order.

Suppose you finally uploaded your speaker list to your guide … but now you realize that the speakers are sorted alphabetically by first name instead of last name!

Don’t worry – fixing this is not as difficult as it seems. If you only have a few speakers, it’s not too hard to re-order them using Gears, our content management system. Unfortunately, though, it’s a different story if the list is long.

In this post, we’ll show you how to take a speaker list sorted by first name and re-sort it by last name. You can use any spreadsheet program to do this. We recommend using either Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc (a free program).

1. Export your list in Gears

Go to the “Export Data” section in Gears. Then go to the “Build” section of your guide and click on “Export Data” in the left-hand column. You’ll see a drop-down list of options. Make sure to choose the CSV export of your Speaker List.

2. Open the CSV file in Excel or OpenOffice

Open the spreadsheet in your program of choice. You’ll notice that the spreadsheet is in a pattern similar to that of our template. Column A is a list of ID numbers – ignore them. Gears uses these ID numbers to update your information.

Click on the image to enlarge.

3. Copy the names column.

Copy the names column. This is what we’ll be editing. Paste it in the column to the far right of your data.

Select the names column. *HINT* On most computers, you can press Ctrl, Shift, + Down Arrow to quickly highlight every filled cell.

Then select Edit, Copy. Click Column E1 and select Edit, Paste. You can also use keyboard shortcuts – Ctrl C, Ctrl V in Windows or Command C, Command V on Macs.

4. Data to Text to Columns

Now highlight all the names you just copied. Look at the top menu bar. There should be a menu item called Data. Click Data and select Text to Columns. If you’re using Open Office, select to separate by space.

If you’re using Excel, select Delimited on the screen, then select Delimited by space.

This process will be different depending on the both the program and the program version you’re using. Look for something along the lines of “Separate” or “Delimit” by space. If you’re unsure about a screen, just accept the defaults. The worst that happens is that you start over!

Once you’ve done this, you should see a spreadsheet similar to the format here:

Note that some of the speakers included their middle initial and that separating by space took up an extra cell for these items. We recommend simply retyping the name with the first name and the middle name together in the first name column. Also, make sure the last name column is accurate before continuing onto the next step – otherwise, the sort will be off.

5. Highlight and sort

Now, we will sort all of the data by last name. Highlight all the rows of data (but not the titles of the columns).

Now, go back to the Data menu. Select Sort or Custom Sort. A screen should pop up, allowing you to sort according to column. We want to sort by the last name column we just created. In this case, sort by Column F since that’s where the last names are.

You’ll notice that all the rows are rearranged – not just the last names column. Now we have the data in the order we need it in. Next, we can delete irrelevant columns and import this template into Gears!

If you want to actually display the last names first, you can use the CONCATENATE function to easily connect the names back together and replace the Names in Column B:

Click Cell G2
Type “CONCATENATE(F2;”, “;E2)” in Open Office or “CONCATENATE(F2,”, “,E2)” in Excel.
Click and drag down the lower right hand corner of the cell.
Copy this data.
Right click Cell B2 and select “Paste Special”
Select values in Excel. (Or uncheck Formulas in Open Office)

You should now have the names displayed as Last Name, First Name. There will be a detailed blog post on the CONCATENATE function later.

6. Delete Irrelevant Data

We don’t need the columns we created. Select the E and F columns, right click and delete them. Your spreadsheet should now only have the columns A-D with the Guidebook Template Headers.

Save this file!

7. Import to Gears!

Make sure the list items aren’t duplicated. Now import your sheet into Gears once again.

TL;DR

1. Export your list in Gears
2. Open the CSV file in Excel or OpenOffice
3. Copy the names column and paste it to the right of your data.
4. Data to Text to Columns separated by a set of parentheses: “ ”. (You’ll have to watch for multiple spaced names)
5. Highlight all the data
6. Sort by Last Name.
7. Delete un-needed columns and retain the template format
8. Import the re-organized file.

Hopefully, this helps you out if you run into this issue while building your guide!