Chelsey [00:00:07]:

What that does is allow place marketers to tell that special story about every single place in the city. And because the maps are brandable and customizable in every way, it makes it really fun for the map viewer and the audience to click around. And they’re very engaging. So we find that companies, organizations who add maps to their marketing efforts will have up to 70% more time spent on that page.

 

Amanda [00:00:37]:

That’s the voice of Chelsea Roney, co-founder of Proxi, an interactive tool for designing and creating maps. Chelsey joins us to discuss how maps can give your place marketing a boost and grow engagement across your platforms. I’m Amanda Ellis, and you’re listening to Inside America’s Best Cities, a podcast for chamber economic development and talent attraction professionals. Learn more about this [email protected] and with that, let’s jump in. Welcome, Chelsey, to Inside America’s Best Cities. We’re super excited to have you and chat about Proxi.

 

Chelsey [00:01:13]:

I’m really glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Amanda.

 

Amanda [00:01:16]:

Well, to start us off, can you just tell us a little bit about what is Proxi? What do you provide for folks?

 

Chelsey [00:01:23]:

Yeah. Proxi is an interactive mapping tool that chambers, economic development offices, visitor centers can use to tell the story of their community in a visual way that their audience can interact with. And then they get data back on those interactions with the map. So, it’s a really great marketing tool.

 

Amanda [00:01:42]:

So I know that your focus is on, hence the name Proxi, which I think comes from proximity. Right? So showing location of things in comparison to each other. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what the data they would get from it would look like?

 

Chelsey [00:01:56]:

Yeah, I can. So based on research, we know that people are spatial beings, so they need to see your recommendations about local place in a visual way on a map. And that’s part of the specialness behind Proxi. It’s very easy to get those local recommendations or local member directory or whatever you need to get on a map, on the map. Every time someone interacts with the map, the map creator understands what those interactions were. So those things can be the number of views, number of unique viewers, the views over time. So if you do a specific marketing push, you can see the efficacy of that push. You can see every click onto every single point. You’re not going to know who clicked it because that would kind of go against some of our values with privacy. But you’ll see those numbers in aggregate. So you’ll see how many clicks to each place, how many clicks on every button that that map point has on it. And then you can also download all of those analytics. Furthermore, we also show you clicks to every category on the map so you can understand what your audience is most interested in. So are they most interested in restaurants in your community? Or are they interested in parks or events or things like this? And that will help you create content that people are really interested in moving forward.

 

Amanda [00:03:22]:

I know as we’ve been partnering with you all more recently and including more maps on livability.com. So just as an example, we’ve been doing a lot of best places to live in each state pieces lately. So, like, I was looking at our Wisconsin one earlier today, and then since we’ve added in the maps, it shows you a point of interest for where those cities are across the state. And it’s really helpful if you’re not that familiar with a certain place to see, just as a quick visual, like, how far are those places away from each other? Where are they in the state? And you probably already know that about a state you’ve lived in for a long time, but if it’s one you’re not as familiar with, it’s just like right there in front of you. So it’s been a really nice look for us to add more context.

 

Chelsey [00:04:03]:

Yeah, thanks. That’s exactly the point of Proxi is allowing people who are not familiar with an area or who need more information and context on the local space to understand where they are in reference to those places.

 

Amanda [00:04:17]:

I understand that there’s a fun Halloween origin story for Proxi that kind of led you and your co-founder to the idea. Can you tell us the story?

 

Chelsey [00:04:26]:

Yeah, sure can. It’s a fun one. So my co-founder Melinda, was in a south Seattle neighborhood Facebook group. We’re all in our neighborhood Facebook groups to see what’s going on. And it was the first Covid Halloween, and parents were still concerned about distance candy delivery and how Halloween would work. And so there was a post that said, hey, if you’re doing distance candy delivery, like setting your candy outside your front door, then add your home to the list in the comments. Now, my co-founder Melinda, had actually done mapping for one of the US intelligence agencies and knew that lists of places don’t work for humans to synthesize data. So she was like, let me get this on a map for my neighbors. And what she did was she took all the addresses in the comments, placed them on a map, and then she strung together several know Google sheets and a couple of other verification tools to make it so that people could add their homes to the map. In addition to the ones that were already there. So what happened was she published this map to the neighborhood Facebook page, and it went viral. People started passing it around. By Halloween, there were 500,000 views on the map, and she ended up getting on Good Morning America. It was like the mom saves Halloween story. And then she and I have been friends for about a decade, and I’ve built a couple of businesses before, and she called me, and she was like, Chelsea, there’s something going on in this space. And what we ended up finding out was that there were no crowd-sourceable mapping tools in the market. And that’s what we built. And people started finding the website. We helped with disaster relief mapping. We helped with Christmas light mapping, family trip mapping. It was very broad use cases at first, but then businesses, organizations like chambers, nonprofits, visitor centers ended up coming to this site and telling us that they needed a solution, a mapping solution that was easy to use, had these extra marketing tools that we have today, and that’s what we ended up building out, and that’s how we got to Proxi today. It’s been almost three plus years since we started it, which is exciting, but we have over 70,000 maps on Proxi today, and many paying users and organizations that choose Proxi for various reasons.

 

Amanda [00:06:57]:

It’s a pretty cool story. So I want to know, did the volume of trick-or-treaters explode and everyone ran out of candy in five minutes?

 

Chelsey [00:07:04]:

Okay, so, yes, that is part of the story. So Melinda was saying, you know, she could see people in her neighborhood walking around with their phone up, looking at the map, and visiting homes based on what they were seeing and interacting with on the map. So, yeah, it was a good Halloween, albeit some scary times during COVID.

 

Amanda [00:07:25]:

So cool. No, that’s really fun. I could see travel implications for this, too, because I think about when I’m trip planning in a city I’ve never been to. That’s a big part of what you wonder when you’re looking at points of interest or you’re trying to create, like, what bars can we go to after dinner? And you’re reading all these ideas, but you have no context of how far things are from each other. So I just end up setting the points on my phone a bunch of different ways, which takes forever.

 

Chelsey [00:07:51]:

Yeah. Proxi can also be used for individual use cases. So we do have many people out there who use it for travel who we just launched a search feature within the tool, so now you can find all of those points of interest within your city just by clicking a button. You can add them all to your map, and then you can even create routes between the points.

 

Amanda [00:08:09]:

So you started to talk about this a little bit just now, but talk more about how your solution is uniquely suited to support chambers and the work that they do.

 

Chelsey [00:08:17]:

Yeah, absolutely. So chambers want to get residents out into the community, spending money at their member businesses, right. Because that, in turn, helps the chamber provide additional services to those businesses. And so what Proxi allows the chamber to do is highlight those local businesses and other points of interest in a way that encourages conversion. So when the chamber produces an engaging map, perhaps it’s for, like, small business Saturday, they can have their chamber brand at the top, they can highlight their member businesses, they can talk about each of those businesses within each map point, really tell a compelling story about why someone should go visit that spot. And then there are some conversion buttons involved, too. So, like, get directions, get more information on a URL, check in at that place. And when they publish that map to the community might be via a newsletter, it might be on social, it might be on a QR code that’s stuck to the front of businesses. Community members or residents, or maybe even visitors, can go in and view that map on their phone, and they can click to different spots and then eventually convert there.

 

Amanda [00:09:36]:

Do you have a case study or specific story you can tell about a chamber or an economic development organization and how they’ve used this and results?

 

Chelsey [00:09:40]:

Yeah. One is for the West Des Moines Chamber in Iowa. They launched a passport challenge using Proxi to encourage foot traffic around the holiday time frame into member businesses. So with Proxi, one of our features is that you can set up an event where you ask people to check in at different places, and they get points for checking in at every place. And it’s like a digital alternative to a stamped passport booklet. And so the West Des Moines Chamber added their membership to this candy Cane challenge, is what they called it. They branded the map holiday themed, they published it in their newsletter, and of course, on social. And all of the member businesses also promoted this challenge. Then community members registered for the challenge using Proxi. It’s very simple, just a couple of clicks, and then they would start visiting these member businesses and checking in, and then they got points and prizes based on those interactions. So that was a really fun one that we just got some really great feedback on.

 

Amanda [00:10:53]:

Can you talk more about how maps contribute to place marketing? So a lot of our listeners, again, in those chamber economic development spaces, are thinking about how to market their place outside of their place, whether that’s for talent attraction, for companies to come, or for even talent retention. Like people that are already in the community.

 

Chelsey [00:11:13]:

Yeah, exactly. So place marketing is all about telling that compelling story about where you live and getting people interested in what makes your city a special place to be. And the beauty of Proxi is that you can add any location to the map, whether it’s a long or an actual place of business, and you can add pictures. We’re about to launch a video embed. So you can put in video, you can put in a long description, you can link out to more information. But what that does is allow place marketers to tell that special story about every single place in the city. And because the maps are brandable and customizable in every way and they’re interactive, it makes it really fun for the map viewer and the audience to click around, and they’re very engaging. So we find that companies, organizations who add maps to their marketing efforts, so whether that’s a newsletter or website will have on a website in particular, up to 70% more time spent on that page than they did before. So people are very engaged with the maps when they find them. They’re fun to click around on. Yeah, I love that.

 

Amanda [00:12:30]:

And I think we’re definitely finding that again with our site and our partnership, just adding that other level of engagement and ways for people to connect with content.

 

Chelsey [00:12:40]:

Yeah. And people are really curious, too. So they’re really curious to see what’s behind every single one of those map points. And when they realize they can get that rich context behind every place on the map, when they click, they choose to click around and stay on that map and better understand the places that are being described.

 

Amanda [00:12:58]:

Yeah, I know. For Livability.com, of course, our focus is small and mid-sized cities, and a lot of those are recognizable names for people. But it kind of depends on where you are in the country, too, like what you’ve heard of and what you haven’t. And then there’s a pretty big population range that we would consider small to mid size. So what I love about this, too, is, again, it gives that extra context of like, oh, where is that in a way that’s really easy to pinpoint in relation to other things that you are familiar with.

 

Chelsey [00:13:26]:

Yeah, exactly. And then if you are in that city or town and you’re literally standing there on Proxi, you can click near me and it will drop like a little pin where you are. So if you’re literally trying to navigate the top ten places to go in Savannah, maybe you can easily do that on the maps.

 

Amanda [00:13:46]:

So that works on any of them. Like, as long as you have your location turned on?

 

Chelsey [00:13:50]:

Yep, exactly.

 

Amanda [00:13:51]:

I didn’t know that. That’s cool.

 

Chelsey [00:13:53]:

It’s a fun feature.

 

Amanda [00:13:56]:

So you’ve incorporated a few AI tools into your work that I was reading a little bit about. Share about those.

 

Chelsey [00:14:03]:

Okay, so we have three AI features right now. I’ll describe a little bit about each. One is text to blog or text to map. I’m sorry. So what you can do is enter Proxi. You can copy and paste your text from wherever you had it previously. So maybe you’ve got a list of places at the chamber that you need to add to the map. You can just paste those in our text to map tool. And what our AI does is it takes that list and it automatically generates a map from all of that text. If you had written a blog post or some other newsletter or whatever text you have about place, just dump that into Proxi and it will generate a map. The second one is our chrome extension. This is one of our most powerful features as a marketer. You already have lots of content out online, out on URLs. You probably have a website with a bunch of blog posts about where to go and what to do in your city. And all you need to do with Proxi is open that chrome extension, click map, and it will take any URL and map all of the places from that URL. And then you can take that map and re embed it into the URL if you so choose, or just publish it wherever you want to. And then the third one is search nearby places. So what you can do in the tool today is just click a button. You can type in a category, like gas stations or restaurants or bars or craft studios or something like this, and it will automatically find those places for you and generate a map. So a lot of options for quick mapping, quick content creation, but at the same time compelling content that will get people out into your city.

 

Amanda [00:15:51]:

Yeah, so these are all different capabilities that any of your clients can tap into depending on what they’re looking for?

 

Chelsey [00:15:58]:

That’s right.

 

Amanda [00:15:59]:

So does all of that come with, like, if you’re working with them on maps, do they just automatically get all of that, or is it like a tiered system of what you want to add?

 

Chelsey [00:16:08]:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, you have access to all of those AI tools within Proxi. They cost a little bit extra to add on.

 

Amanda [00:16:17]:

And coming close to closing out here, can you share a little bit about you and your co-founder, Melinda? What were you all doing before this? And how did that inform you, launching this platform?

 

Chelsey [00:16:28]:

Yeah, absolutely. So in my prior life, I’ve actually owned two different businesses. One was a software, actually, for sorority recruitment. We ended up working with more than half of the sororities in the country. And that was a really fun. Yeah, it was really a fun company to run.

 

Amanda [00:16:47]:

Does that still exist?

 

Chelsey [00:16:49]:

It does. It was combined with a couple of other firms in the industry, but it’s still an operation. Fascinating. Yeah. And then my next one was a landscape installation firm, a far deviation from software, but it was a fun adventure nonetheless. And then I also worked at Microsoft and marketing and Boeing and finance. So an interesting combination of things, but really good skills in terms of learning how to build a business operate at scale and things like that. And then Melinda worked in one of the US intelligence agencies before going to the University of Washington to work on her PhD in human centered design. She’s almost done with that, but she left just before her dissertation to work on Proxi, and I sold my company to work on Proxi. So it was a jump into the unknown. But mapping is something we’re both very passionate about.

 

Amanda [00:17:49]:

That is a great story. So I always close out with a fun question. So you’re based in Seattle, right?

 

Chelsey [00:17:54]:

Yes. Yeah.

 

Amanda [00:17:55]:

Okay. So we always ask our guests if someone were like, what is one bucket list item that you would say that they had to do, and maybe something a little bit off the beaten path?

 

Chelsey [00:18:07]:

Okay, so in Seattle, you can take a ferry right out of the city to a neighboring island. And I think that is just one of the most beautiful ways to see the city skyline and get a view of the water. You’re actually out on the water. You can walk on, you can drive on, and then you go visit an island. And those islands, depending on which you choose to go to, each have a different personality, and it really shows off the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

 

Amanda [00:18:38]:

Very cool. Well, thank you so much, Chelsea. I think our listeners will get a lot out of this interview. It’s a little bit different topic for us and really appreciate you taking the time.

 

Chelsey [00:18:46]:

Thanks, Amanda.

 

Amanda [00:18:52]:

Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast, where we take you Inside America’s Best Cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-sized cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate, and review this show. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can also learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. Have an idea for an upcoming episode? Email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability, I’m Amanda Ellis, sharing the stories of America’s most promising places.