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Geocaching: An Innovative Emerging Activity
Geocaching is an emerging activity where participants use GPS to hide and find caches globally, with applications in marketing and education. It has been utilized by universities and businesses for creative campaigns, such as promoting Coca-Cola and attracting visitors to historic sites. The document outlines a 10-step marketing and communication plan for implementing geocaching as a strategy, emphasizing collaboration and creativity in organizing a geocaching campaign.
Geocaching: An Innovative Emerging Activity
- 1.
- 2. What is geocaching?Participants(a.k.a., “geocachers”) use GPS systems to hide and find “geocaches” almost anywhere in the world. (They can even be found in Antarctica.)Dain Schroeder, “Treasure Hunting with Your iPhone?
- 3. How long hasit been around?A full decade. However, it has only recently entered the fields of marketing and education. In fact, start ups have recently emerged to professionally develop geocaching campaigns for businesses.
- 4. Example Use ina Class“Teams of students will use GPS units to locate geocaches that their instructor has hidden around their school campus. Students will return to the classroom with the recovered geocaches, examine and discuss the contents of the geocaches, determine a number of possible ways to categorize the contents of each geocache, and then use Excel™ to create spreadsheets and graphs that represent the categorized data. The contents of each geocache can be sorted in two or more ways.”GPS and Geocaching Guide for Educators by Dr. Alice A. Christie, Arizona State University President’s Professor Emeritus. Sample lessons
- 5. Example of aBusiness UseIn 2007 students used geocaching to promote Coca-Cola for their campaign in the National Student Advertising Competition, a student contest run by the American Advertising Federation. For further information check out Students Campaign for Coca-Cola.
- 6. Example of aBusiness UseJoshua Noble is the director of tourism for the Kingman, Arizona Area Chamber of Commerce. His cache superimposes historic photos over the modern-day locations and hopes to use such old photos to draw geocachers to various historic points of interest in and around the city.
- 7. Example of aBusiness UseIn 2001, 14 geocaches were placed with 20th Century Fox to publicize the movie Planet of the Apes.
- 8. Example of aBusiness UseExample of a Business Use A number of state and local parks encourage geocaching to attract visitors. Lincoln City, Oregon had 500 coins made. These coins have an icon and are trackable.
- 9. Example of UniversityUsageUC Berkeley, Oxford University and the University of Ottawa have up to 47 geocaches scattered around campus. Florida State University has 20 caches on or near campus and many people try to “collect” the full set.
- 10. What does acache look like? What am I looking for?
- 11. Bottom line- Thisis a yet generally untapped marketing and communication tool in business or at the higher education level.
- 12. How might creativeand innovative minds put geocaching to work to draw in customers or raise awareness of academic programs? What are the steps?
- 13. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan1. Do your due diligence.Facilitate a meeting with current geochachers within the business or university. Some universities have student geocaching clubs. Check out Kansas State University, Marshall University, Fort Hays State University There is your gold mine! Or check this site to determine if there is a local geocaching club nearby. Contact that organization for support.
- 14. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan2. Go on your own geocaching adventure! Meet together afterwards to discuss as a group. Use the After Action Review (AAR) process- What did you expect to happen? What actually happened? What did you learn?
- 15. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan3. Determine the business case for change.What do you want to raise awareness about? If a business, what is special about your product or service? What are you proud of? What’s your elevator speech? If you represent a university, what makes you a cut above others? What do you do better than the others? What’s your elevator speech? Or is there a particular cause you support, such as the environment. But stay away from hot political issues!
- 16. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan4. Conduct a Risk Analysis.What might go wrong? What would you do? What might become a barrier? How would this barrier be removed?
- 17. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan5. Review your resources. Consider your human resources. You have a great marketing and communication opportunity to harness your current employees or students (and alumni) to create a “raving fans” campaign based on their creation of geocaching boxes with something you supply and they augment with their own creativity.
- 18. Do you havefunds to have a special cachet box made, symbolizing your institution? Do you have funds to put in some “swag” representing your business or college?Marketing and Communication: A 10 Step Plan6. Items you can put into the “box”Brainstorm. Don’t eliminate any idea. Put them all up on the board.
- 19. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan7. Set a meeting with Senior Leadership to review the business case for change, potential risks and responses, resource issues and high level communication plan.
- 20. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan8. Create a Steering Committee Write a charter including roles and responsibilities of all members and ensure that they have read and agreed to the document.
- 21. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan9. Go to the official global geocaching site, Geocaching.com, and register. You can get a basic free membership or pay for one for $30/year.
- 22. Marketing and Communication:A 10 Step Plan10. Create a written communication plan on raising awareness, and interest, in your geocaching campaign.
Editor's Notes
- #3 A simple geocache (or simply “cache”) is a small water-resistant container with a logbook and pen in it. You can buy specially designed caches, but a regular Tupperware container will do. Unlike pirate treasure, caches aren’t buried. If you can find your way to the GPS coordinates, you should be able to find the cache. Note that the caches listed on geocaching.com may come with clues to help you find them. (“Look for the missing brick in the ivy-covered wall.”)
- #8 Each cache represented a fictional story in which scientists revealed an Alternative Primate Evolution. The caches, marked ammo containers, also included an original prop from the movie. Only a few Project A.P.E. caches exist today.
- #9 Each cache represented a fictional story in which scientists revealed an Alternative Primate Evolution. The caches, marked ammo containers, also included an original prop from the movie. Only a few Project A.P.E. caches exist today.
- #10 Brown University has 14 tiny or nano caches that take you on a tour of the university’s Providence neighborhood. In effect, students, and others, have created sets of team building events or campus orientation to new students in a social context. Purposively or not, the universities have crowd sourced the work.
- #11 They come in all sizes and shapes! BYOP (Bring Your Own Pen) to sign the logbook. And, if you take a token out, the rules say you must drop your own little keepsake into the cache for others to find! They can be easy to find, as in PNG (Park and Grab), or more challenging to locate. And you will be given clues along the way. When you get near the stash, the app will announce that you are close!
- #19 I prefer to give meeting participants a pack of post its and then have them write one idea per post it. Then when they all have generated ideas I have everyone stand up and place their post its on a brown paper wall I set up and move them around as they see what others have suggested. The audience groups them themselves. All in all, this is a time saver and a more physically involved approach.
- #20 Secure buy in. You can adapt the slides found on Slideshare if you need support. Remember- buy in and support from Senior Leadership is critical to the success of any change process. Checkout John Kotter’s eight step change plan. It is a classic.
- #21 I prefer to give meeting participants a pack of post its and then have them write one idea per post it. Then when they all have generated ideas I have everyone stand up and place their post its on a brown paper wall I set up and move them around as they see what others have suggested. The audience groups them themselves. All in all, this is a time saver and a more physically involved approach.
- #22 I prefer to give meeting participants a pack of post its and then have them write one idea per post it. Then when they all have generated ideas I have everyone stand up and place their post its on a brown paper wall I set up and move them around as they see what others have suggested. The audience groups them themselves. All in all, this is a time saver and a more physically involved approach.
- #23 The plan should include who does what by when. Someone must oversee the plan and I suggest the traffic light approach- Green if completed, yellow if in trouble and red if a train wreck. For further information see Communication Plans- The Triple Ts of Transparency, Truth and Trust and Presentations and Media That Stick