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02
November

Tour of Campus Landmarks

November 2, 2016
In
By Sarah Pounders

The University of Queensland St. Lucia Campus in Brisbane, Australia has unique and symbolic carvings etched throughout their campus’ buildings.  While the Saint Lucia Campus already has an app tour of their campus, UQ Walking Tours, they wanted to show the beauty and importance of these carvings in a walking tour app to share with their community and the world.  The UQ Carvings App was created using the App Builder Website and depicts more than 1,000 carvings located throughout the scenic campus.

The App

The UQ Carvings App for iOS and Android gives users an inttimate look into the beautiful carvings featured throughout The Great Court area of the University.  The Great Court was designed to be a modern take on the European quadrangles of monasteries and universities. This video describes the significance of the Great Court Carvings:

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ_xRCkvWdw[/embedyt]

 

The UQ Carvings App tour is organized by building and shows the various areas with carvings along with a caption.  Users can get walking directions to each building and encounter the rich carvings first hand.  Now visitors can not only see each carving in the UQ Carvings App, but they can locate them on campus and better understand the significance of each carving.  Download the UQ Carvings to experience this beautiful space.

 

hospital app tour
27
October

Hospital App Tour with Video

October 27, 2016
In
By Sarah Pounders

Dayton Children’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio wanted to showcase additions to their facility.   They created a hospital app tour with video that gives visitors a virtual tour of their state of the art facility.  The hospital used the App Builder Website to create their tour with branding, images, audio and video for the App Store and Google Play.  

The Hospital App Tour

The Dayton Children’s Hospital App shows how beautiful, inviting and warm a children’s hospital can be.  After viewing the app, users see how the facility has been growing.  The  app gives a VIP tour of all the different areas of the hospital that are helping to reach every child who visits.    However, the hospital doesn’t just include a registration desk, rehabilitation area and pharmacy, but it also shows a fun photo booth, a lighted staircase, and a ball maze!

 

Now, users can see and hear how Dayton Children’s Hospital works for children and families.  Users can even check-in at Urgent Care through a link in the app.  The Dayton Children’s Hospital App provides a comprehensive tour of the hospital.  The app invites users to connect with the hospital to discover why Dayton Children’s Hospital is just right for your child.

 

Want to learn more about how the App Builder works?  Watch this video.

 

28
August

Historic Public Garden, Melbourne, Australia

August 28, 2016
In
By Sarah Pounders

The Burnley Gardens App gives a tour of one of the oldest public gardens in Melbourne, Australia. This self-guided tour takes users through 22 stops with audio that discusses specific garden beds, historical events, rare plants and our iconic trees as well as the modern elements of green infrastructure on campus. The walk will inform you about the gardens history, the design principles and current uses.  Each stop is GPS enabled, a map of the tour is provided and the stops are clearly marked in the Gardens.

28
August

Campus Tour, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

August 28, 2016
In
By Sarah Pounders

The app is a tour of the campus of City of Asylum, a Pittsburgh, PA.  The City of Asylum nonprofit provides sanctuary to endangered writers and serves the community with literary and arts-based programs. The City of Asylum App is a five-chapter audio tour includes commentary by Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, Thaddeus Mosley, Oliver Lake, and City of Asylum co-founders Henry Reese and Diane Samuels.

28
August

Campus Tour, Brisbane, Australia

August 28, 2016
In
By Sarah Pounders

The UQ App gives users a tour of the St. Lucia Campus at University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.  The University knows how important it is for potential and new students to find their way around campus as well and communicating the values, history and story behind the beautiful sandstone campus of St. Lucia.  The UQ App fills this need by offering a self guided tour of the campus with audio, images and specific walking directions around the campus to actual visitors to the campus as well as interested students and parents who want to check on the campus virtually on their smartphone or tablet.

The University of Queensland St. Lucia Campus also created a campus tour of their unique carvings throughout the campus.  Read more about the UQ Carvings app.  

25
August

Foreign Language Tours, Stone Mountain, Georgia

August 25, 2016
In
By Sarah Pounders

Stone Mountain Park’s recent app launch using the Tour Buddy App Builder features a multi-guide app that showcases 6 foreign language self-guided app tours, enhances engagement and creates a better experience for both the park employees and visitors. Caroline Figiel of Creative Digital Productions shares more about the experience using the Tour Buddy App Builder and the overwhelmingly positive impact on Stone Mountain’s visitor experience. To learn more about using Tour Buddy to create a foreign language app tour for your destination, click here. 

Creative Digital Production’s  Mission:

Our Mission…to interpret Stone Mountain’s and Georgia’s history using engaging audio spots on an affordable and easy to navigate delivery platform in multiple languages.

The Results: A Foreign Language Tour App Featuring 6 Languages

A beautifully crafted 6 language mobile app where visitors can imagine another time and place; designed so that each user can take a self-guided tour of each site and know exactly where they are on the GPS enabled map without the attention of a tour guide or fumbling with a paper map.

The Buzz: Visitor Engagement & Experience

Do park employees on the front lines of tourist engagement feel proud to offer a quality product? Yes! Is visitor feedback overwhelming for both the content and the delivery platform? You betcha!

The Story: 

As interpretation specialists, we knew that we had been given, not mounds of boring information for a report, but instead… the seeds for some really good storytelling about Georgia and the mountain which would “edu-tain” every person who downloads the app. You see Stone Mountain itself, is not only the largest exposed granite mass in the world, but is also the site of the largest bas-relief carving in the world. Did you know because of political events, temperamental artists, and financial struggles, the carving took 55 years to complete? That in itself is a sweeping saga worthy of a summer blockbuster!

From the beginning my partner Danny, and I knew we would uncover many fascinating events and amusing legends, so we decided in partnership with Stone Mountain Park, to let many of the stories tell themselves through fictionalized characters based on the time period of the subject matter. As the scripts began to unfold, our characters came to represent a cross section of Georgia’s population in the 1700-1900s including  a frontier doctor, farmer’s wife, field slave, rich planter, and real life super hero.  Some of their stories would tickle your funny bone while others would tug at your heart.

As script writing and production of  the initial 22 “edu-taining” audio spots were taking place, we began phase two: implementation.  In order for media interpretation to be successful, the production can’t stand alone.  If technology fails, the carefully crafted content won’t be heard and users will become frustrated, so it really was essential to offer a delivery platform that allowed visitors the best user experience. With 132 media files, Tour Buddy’s Multi-Guide App was our best choice.

On the back-end for us, the app was very easy to load and could handle a lot of media because it was a Multi-Guide App. We were able to create one tour and then copy it so that we did not have to enter data multiple times. Once downloaded, visitors enter in a special passcode for their specific language to find the GPS guided tours, insightful video links, picture gallery and social media links.

Stone Mountain Park can now reach each visitor to inform, engage and entertain in order to create lifelong memories and a unique understanding of Stone Mountain Park and its history.

That in itself is worthy of a tale!

 

10
August

Campus Tour, Tampa, Florida

August 10, 2016
In
By Sarah Pounders

Big Cat Rescue, a sanctuary for big cats, wanted to communicate their mission of rescuing abused and abandoned big cats through a virtual tour app.  Carole Baskin, CEO of Big Cat Rescue created the Big Cat Rescue App as well as the Spanish version, Grandes Felinos al Rescate using the App Builder Website.  Read about how this non-profit organization is spreading the word and awareness about its important mission through their app.

 

Interview with Big Cat Rescue

We caught up with Big Cat Rescue’s #1 cat lover and CEO Carole Baskin about her experience using our tour App Builder Platform.  The app offers a tour of the Big Cat Rescue Sanctuary complete with photos and audio for over 100 Cats along with a GPS based and Campus map.  The app is updated as new cats are brought in to the sanctuary.  The app is available for iPhone and Android.

Tour Buddy: What made you decide to build an app for your organization?

Baskin: We had an app designed for us by a donor, but we didn’t have the ability to keep it current and didn’t want to keep asking him to update it, so the Tour Buddy app was a great way to get what we wanted, without bothering anyone else.

Tour Buddy: How long did it take to create the content and create the app using the Tour Buddy app builder website?

Baskin: It took me two days to build our tour, and that included 105 exotic cats (or stops, as would be the lingo on most tours). There was a photo of each cat, a written bio and an audio bio recording for each cat. We also plotted each cat out on a map in the app. I think it could have been done in a day, if I had all of the files ready ahead of time.

Tour Buddy: What is some of the feedback you have received from the app users?

Baskin: Big Cat Rescue app users love being able to see the cats and hear their stories. It is also a great training tool for our tour guides to learn the cats’ stories and facts about all of the cats at the sanctuary.

Tour Buddy: What is the best part about your app?

Baskin: My favorite thing about Tour Buddy is the ability to update it any time and that it is available in both the App Store and the Google Play Store.

Tour Buddy: What did you like about working with Tour Buddy to create your app?

Baskin: The interface was so user friendly that I didn’t need to schedule training and that means a lot to me since time is what I have the least of.

Tour Buddy: What advice would you give to other organizations that are looking to create an app?

Baskin: The Tour Buddy app is IT. No one knows your site like you do, so take the time to put it all in an app and you will benefit from the effort.

Tour Buddy: How often do you make updates to the app content?

Baskin: We update the content less than once a month and expect that we will maintain this same schedule.

Tour Buddy: What impact has your app had on your organization?

Baskin: The Tour Buddy app has enabled me to make sure that every tour guide gets the exact, “purrfect” story on each cat. In the past, our tour guides trained tour guides and, like the old game of telephone, the message gets changed the more it is handed down. We use a written guide, but people still repeat what they hear more than what they read. By having our audio stories all contained in the Big Cat Rescue app, every guide is hearing the accurate and relevant stories of the 105 exotic cats at the sanctuary.

More Big Cat Rescue Information

Find Big Cat Rescue on YouTube at BigCatTV.com (More than 63,000,000 views) or on

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/BigCatRescue (More than 95,000 Big Cat Rescue fans).

Tour Buddy helps its clients reach new audiences.  Create an app, update it on the fly, and build your own tour in less than a week (Baskin finished theirs in TWO DAYS!).  If you are interested in creating your own mobile app, or you have a question about our tour app builder, please feel free to sign up for your 14 day free trial! You can also check out our FAQ page for more information.