#FeelFrenchCulture — putting cultural events on the map.
Offering the catalogue of cultural events on a smart map puts the depth-and-breath of the Ile-de-France’s cultural landscape at everyone’s fingertips.
As one of the world’s top tourist markets, the Paris region does not lack for name recognition or must-see attractions. From the Eiffel Tower, to Notre Dame, to Sacre Coeur, to the Chateau de Versailles, to the Louvre, to the Musee d’Orsay, to name just a few, there is an abundance of world-reknown destinations.
The traditional map of Paris captures these iconic locations and often looks something like this :
However, the City of Lights has much more to offer a tourist or business traveller that can’t be easily captured on a static map as the area is constantly buzzing with events. In an era of experience-driven tourism, conveying to travelers the dynamism of a cultural scene is a challenge.
Confronted with the task of raising visibility for and driving traffic to an incredibly diverse range of cultural activities, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication turned to Wemap to build an interactive map for the #FeelFrenchCulture campaign.
Current State of Play
With so many events and destinations, the options for any traveler or local in Paris are boundless. Unfortunately, finding something interesting and nearby is exceedingly cumbersome.
A quick Google search using ‘things to do this weekend in Paris’ yields results such as the following from a leading brand
while the results from the City of Paris’ website are presented in a similar manner.
The results of the same search query on a map is even more dissatisfying.
No matter the format or the platform, the result is a frustrating inability of the audience to find a viable answer to the search query for ‘things to do’ much less one that puts the user at the center of the answers provided; to say nothing of enabling local authorities to effectively deliver the information users are looking for.
The unique role of governmental or public-private actors
As governmental entities, the Ministry of Culture and its regional partners have a crucial and multifaceted role to play in the dissemination and promotion of events taking place within the region.
In addition to curating an events calendar for the region, they or member organizations often host or are sponsors of many of the activities themselves.
By encouraging the participation of local institutions, the Ministry of Culture or any other CVB is able to create, maintain and curate a robust events dataset for a given region thus creating a ‘Cultural Season’ festival.
Critically, how to unlock the power of this dataset to crack the ‘what is there to do this weekend/on my trip’ question and to maximize the visibility of live performances or exhibits while putting these answers at the audience’s fingertips requires a new approach.
A new path forward
Having identified the difficulty to communicate the richness of the cultural landscape to their audience and the imperative to do so in a cost-effective manner, the Ministry of Culture turned to Wemap to deliver an intuitive and interactive solution.
Step one consisted of encouraging member and partner institutions to input their events using a unified format, OpenAgenda.
The creation of a connector between their dataset and Wemap enabled the Ministry of Culture to accomplish many editorially relevant decisions in one step, including information such a date, time, tags as well as to nest multiple events at the same location.
The initial act of curation is clearly reflected in the specificity and utility of the tags selected as they are broad enough to encompass many different types of events but specific enough to help the audience narrow down their choices very quickly.
The nesting of events at a given location enables the cultural institutions featured to display all of the current and future events hosted on-site, a critical feature for museums and theaters, and expose them to user searches.
Data harvesting, curation and editioral decisions made, the creation of smart maps highlighting this data set puts cultural events on the map.
Delivering a user-centered experience for events
Putting the user at the heart of the story, enabling them to make a few necessary choices or simply explore the content freely, fundamentally changes the state of play.
Local constituents and tourists are no longer searching long lists of photos with limited information about the location of events and their relative proximity and, or correlation to their actual interests. Users expect a true local companion, seamlessly guiding them.
Upon reaching the dedicated site, the visitor makes a few initial selections to narrow down the event displayed to only those which are of immediate interest.
Question 1. When are you coming to Paris?
Question 2. What kind of events are you interested in?
Question 3. Where are you or where will you be while in Paris?
Answer — here are the results for your query.
You can save and share the event directly from the map as as well.
No matter the search query, in just seconds, the user has the ability to find the cultural event of interest to them, on the dates they’ve selected and in a location of interest.
The service extends to the on-location travel experience: with a tap on the “around-me” button the end-user accesses the events in their immediate vicinity.
A cultural events platform in just minutes
The user-centered display and search features of the interactive map enable the Ministry of Culture and Communication and their partners to create a map-based platform of their event calendar.
The interactive map is the default display on dedicated http://saisonculturelle.fr site and it will eventually include over 5 language options.
The ease of distribution of the catalog of events through the embedded maps is one of the reasons why the Ministry of Culture opted to partner with Wemap on this project.
The sharing features of the map enable the media partners to create and embed curated versions of the map in a few clicks.
As the campaign unfolds, we look forward to sharing with you how the transformation of a list of events into a veritable live performances and cultural exhibitions platform is leveraged and amplified across multiple distribution channels.
From #FeelFrenchCulture to #Feel-InsertYourCityHere-Culture
The creation of a year-long ‘Cultural Season’ highlighting a wide variety of activities ranging from museum exhibitions, to concerts, to workshops, to festivals and much, much more enables the Ministry of Culture to capitalize on the ‘festival phenomenon’.
Festivals have proved themselves to be an effective way to create momentum and visibility for a tourist destination, attracting additional media coverage and dollars-spent from locals and tourists alike.
By creating a unified dataset and connecting it to a dedicated interactive map the Ministry of Culture is able to create a festival-like approach to the already exisiting events taking place within the region.
Not every city or region has the magnitude of cultural offerings found in Paris. However, every destination is home to numerous events that can easily be repackaged to create a ‘festival’ without significant new resources.
Connecting these events to a Wemap powered interactive gives the local authorities the ability to generate increased visibilty for the long-tail of cultural events occuring in their region, making everyday an opportuity to #FeelCulture.
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Wemap developed a breakthrough map technology that has been adopted in a few months by global leaders like Le Parisien, Hachette and ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The French-American start-up is building a smart maps platform to offer individuals and organizations a bridge to the real world: combining meaningful information and practical services. Wemap combines an intuitive user experience and a powerful tool to connect a map to any sources and publish it. By empowering publishers to create and embed live maps with their content in minutes, Wemap has already reached 4 millions monthly viewers of its maps.
To learn more about Wemap’s technology: https://getwemap.com.
