Viewing results and reports
Access Social Map results and reports to understand the outcomes of the activity.
The Social Map tool provides you the ability to create captivating, customisable maps for collecting location-based feedback from your participants.
By using interactive mapping, participants can respond to questions by 'pinning' their feedback on specific locations. A participant’s contribution consists of a qualitative comment and an (optional) image upload.
We are excited to introduce a new enhancement on the Social Map, the integration with the Form tool! With this, you can create forms directly within the
Social Map tool and link them to specific marker categories. This
empowers you to gather feedback that is tailored and relevant to each
marker category, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of your
community's needs and preferences.
Contributions in the activity are displayed publicly, allowing visitors to explore the map to view what others have shared.
Categories can be utilized to enhance the participants experience and gather more structured feedback. (i.e. issues, ideas, observations, etc.). Categories can then be customised with unique names, colours, icons, and prompting questions. When leaving a contribution, users are required to select which category they are responding to.
Data collected through the Social Map is stored in a spatial-format, facilitating easy mapping for visual representation and analysis. The stored data includes geographic x-y coordinates and a geo-coded 'address' that provides the nearest known address. This dual storage approach ensures that the feedback is not only visually represented on the map but also accessible for further analysis and insights.
With the Form integration, you can now seamlessly combine the power of Forms and the Social Map to collect a more comprehensive and relevant feedback from your users!
Here's quick way to add a Form survey to your Social Map:
Please note as this is an integration of the Form tool, you can use most of the features available to the Form tool like Logic and Sections, see here for more details about the Form Logic & Section.
The Marker Category is now a required element in the Social Map it can help categorise the data you are collecting in your engagement. In addition, create a richer mapping experience and facilitate the analysis of feedback.
Categories allows your participants to choose from your pre-defined list (i.e. Issues, Ideas, Opportunities, etc) to classify their contributions as well as cater your form questions to the category they selected. You can link different forms to different Marker Categories.
You can add your own categories to the map (we recommend not using more than five) and give them a unique colour and icon.
To add and style categories:
💡 User Tip: You must create a Form question in order to create a marker category.
Once saved you can choose to display the category legend on the map.
You can let your participants react to posts from other participants by enabling the voting and rating features of the Social Map.
Voting lets participants show support (or lack of support) for a particular post, while rating lets you gauge the extent of that support.
You can select from four different voting and rating methods, depending on your use case:
Voting lets participants give a thumbs up or thumbs down to another participant's post. You can enable upvoting and downvoting to capture positive and negative sentiment, or only allow upvoting to capture agreement, praise or support.
Star rating lets participants react on a scale of 1-5 stars, which is ideal for understanding the degree to which a participant agrees or disagrees with the content.
Like star rating, sentiment rating uses a scale of 1-5, but uses smileys instead of stars. This divergent scale lets you capture participant sentiment at a more nuanced level than just upvoting/downvoting.
Traffic-light rating lets your users provide one of three reactions: 'Stop', 'Pause', or 'Go'. This is great for gauging participant support for specific proposals.
⚠️ Warning
Changing the voting/rating method during a live engagement will result in any existing data you've collected being removed. This data cannot be recovered.
Voting and rating can be enabled independently of map posts, which lets you stage these feedback activities at different times.
For example, you can collect ideas from participants on the map in stage 1, close off participants ability to leave new ideas after a set time, and then allow participants to rate the ideas collected in stage 2.
The results of all voting and rating data are provided in the summary reports and an average score for all voting and rating activities is presented in the data table to facilitate further analysis.
The average score of any voting/rating activity is also displayed when a post is viewed from the map, appearing in the top-right of each post.
10 different base map styles can be used in the Social Map. Each base map style presents a different visual style or level of detail that can be selected to meet the specific needs of your engagement.
In some cases, using a more indicative, illustrative map such as the ‘Open Street Map’ or ‘Google Road Map’ may be appropriate, while in others, a more detailed aerial/satellite image may be preferable. Minimal base map styles can be used to create visually attractive styles.
The available base maps include:
| General Purpose A simple and versatile street-based map from Mapbox. |
| Standard Street A map that highlights road and street information from Mapbox. |
| Community Sourced A very detailed map providing a high level of context crowd-sourced from the commercial-free Open Street Maps. |
| Standard Satellite Vibrant and colorful satellite photography from Mapbox. |
| Detailed Satellite High resolution satellite photography from Google Maps. |
| Standard Hybrid Vibrant and colorful satellite photography overlaid with key names and transport routes from Mapbox. |
| Detailed Hybrid High resolution satellite photography overlaid with key names and transport routes from from Google Maps. |
| Light A stylised, minimalistic map with light tones from Mapbox. |
| Dark A stylised, minimalistic map with dark tones from Mapbox. |
| High Contrast A very minimal, stylised map with black and white features from Stamen. |
Multiple base maps can also be defined for each Social Map, with the participant having the ability to select which basemap they want to use. If more than one base map is selected, the map that is first loaded can be set by choosing the desired base map from the ‘default base map’ dropdown.
To select the base map(s) to be used in the activity:
If only one base map is selected, the user will not be able to switch between base map styles.
In addition to the standard base map styles, custom base maps can be brought in from third party services including MapBox or a custom Web Mapping Service (WMS).
To add a custom base map:
As a Site User you can control the pitch and bearing of the initial map so that it can load the map with a 3D perspective for the contributor.
Spatial data layers can be added to the base map to provide further information and context to the visitor. Points, lines and polygons can all be added to the Social Map. This can be useful to highlight areas or features related to the activity.
The Social Map uses the WGS 1984 geographic coordinate system. When uploading your spatial data layers, your files will automatically be converted into this system.
Map layers can be added from .shp or .geojson files. To add layers via GeoJSON or Shapefile:
When working with the shapefile format, it is important to note that these are comprised of multiple files, that necessarily include .shp, .shx and .dbf, but can also include a variety of optional files with different formats.
To use shapefiles within The HiVE, all relevant files must be converted to a .zip file in order to be used within the mapping tools.
If you want to draw your own data layers, but don’t have GIS skills or software, you can use this free tool. It helps let you easily draw point layers, lines or polygons. Simply sketch the features, save as .geojson and upload into The HiVE.
Custom data layers can be added to the base map to provide further information and context to the visitor. Points, lines and polygons can all be added to the Social Map. To add custom layers:
mages of plans, diagrams or other non-spatial data can be superimposed on the basemap to give it a spatial context and collect spatially accurate feedback.
To add a geo-referenced image to the Social Map:
*You only need the location of two points:
1. The point where you want the Top Left corner of your image placed
2. The point where you want the Bottom Right corner of your image placed.
The coordinates N and W refer to the Latitude and Longitude of point 1. The S and E refer to the Latitude and Longitude of point 2.
Example:
Once data layers have been added you can adjust their visual style and add items to a legend to denote what each layer symbolises. The following style properties can be adjusted:
Once a data layer has been added, you can add a symbol to the legend that let the user know what each layer represents. Legend items must be manually created, and a single layer can have more than one legend item (which can be useful if adding multiple features in a single layer from Carto).
Currently, legend symbols are only displayed as simple circles with an adjustable fill and stroke color.
To add and style a legend item:
The masking layer feature provides a powerful way to highlight a study area or features on a map, and can also be used to restrict user contributions to a defined geographical area.
The masking feature works by adding a spatial data layer which will be used to define the masking area. By default, the mask uses the uploaded geometry to ‘cut-out’ an area from the mask shape as if it was a cookie cutter. This allows you to style the areas outside of the original shape by styling the masking layer.
The masking layers will sit above all other data layers that are added to the map. Up to seven ‘features’ can be included in the masking layer - anything more than this will cause the page to crash.
To add a masking layer:
The masking layer can also be ‘inverted’ which will allow you to style the original shape that was uploaded. To invert the mask, select the ‘invert mask’ checkbox.
To restrict participants from dropping pins outside of the mask, select 'Restrict markers to mask'.
You can restrict the location of where users are allowed to add map markers using the masking layer. This will mean that your participants will only be able to make contributions within a defined geo-graphical area such as a ‘study area’.
To do this, check the ‘Restrict markers to mask’ checkbox under the Mask setting.
Bookmarks can be added to display pre-defined geographic locations within the study area that help visitors navigate the map to focus on key areas.
Bookmarks are displayed at the top, centre of the map as a dropdown menu. Selecting the bookmark will automatically zoom and pan the map to the nominated location.
To add bookmarks:
In some cases where there are hundreds or even thousands of contributions appearing on the map, it may be desirable to cluster the map markers so that the map appears clearer.
Enabling the ‘Marker Clustering’ setting will allow individual map markers that are in close proximity to one another to be displayed as a single aggregated marker. The Marker Cluster then displays the number of contributions within it, and when clicked by a user will zoom the map in and disaggregate the individual map markers.
It is worth noting that marker clustering doesn’t affect the data. It's just a way of visually consolidating the markers. It can be easily enabled/disabled from the block settings any time.
Once you have Marker Clustering enabled you can edit the following properties
The Social Map uses the Google Places API to take the precise location of each map marker and display them as an address through a process called geo-coding. This makes it easier to interpret the results of the Social Map if you don’t have access to mapping software or skills, by making the location more human readable (as opposed to x/y coordinates).
The geo-coded address can be displayed on the front-end of a participant’s contribution to provide more context. This can be people for non-sighted users who can’t see maps or for people who have difficulties interpreting them.
To enable this feature, navigate to the ‘Display’ tab and find the ‘Display Marker Location’ which is set to not display by default. From the dropdown select either ‘Display approximate location’ or ‘display precise location’. The ‘approximate location’ setting will provide the street name only and will remove any specific street numbers. The ‘precise location’ setting will include the exact street number and name.
Using the ‘precise location’ option will display exact address information which may have privacy implications. You should thoroughly assess the potential risks prior to enabling this setting.
Please note that the geocoder may not be completely accurate, especially if a marker is dropped in a public space or in developing areas. The geo-coder will try and find the nearest address to where the pin is dropped. If address location is critical to your analysis we suggest collecting this information in another way.
To further elevate and innovate our focus on creating the best-in-class software solution dedicated to community engagement, we have decided to rebrand The HiVE as Social Pinpoint with an exciting update to the Social Pinpoint brand to match!
Community engagement is an ongoing process of collaboration and co-learning. When we evaluate our community engagement initiatives, we give ourselves the opportunity to measure our deeper impact and make improvements for future projects.
With the right action plan in place, we can ensure we are connecting with our community on an appropriate level to enhance public decision-making.