Ning Tip: HOW TO MAP YOUR NETWORK MEMBERS

Steps for Mapping Your Members:

Short Steps for Mapping Your Members:

• 1. Export your member data

  2. Import the CSV to google docs

  3. Convert spreadsheet into a fusion table

  4. Geocode the Location Column

  5. Set privacy to anyone with link

  6. Embed in a page..

Steps for Mapping Explained:

Export your member data - Go to the admin dashboard of your network and go to the Member Management section, scroll to the bottom right and you'll see a link to "Export Member Data". In a few minutes you'll recieve an email with your member data. Download that spreadsheet/csv file to your computer.

Import the CSV to google docs- Now import that spreadsheet to google drive/google docs converting it into the google spreadsheets or CSV format. Try to make sure that ALL COLUMNS HAVE AT LEAST SOME DATA IN THEM because if you have too many empty cells in the spreadsheet, it will not process in the next step. Now assuming you do not want all of your member data to be public, you'll want to delete a few of the columns such as Email,Recieving Broadcasts, Date Joined, Age, Gender... these will be entirely up to you. Now click Share> Anyone with the Link

Convert spreadsheet into a fusion table- Create a new fusion table like so:

*If you do not have fusion tables you can add them as a Drive app by clicking Create>More Apps and find Fusion Tables App.

*Sometimes when creating a fusion table and trying to import strait from Google Docs, you'll get an error. When this happens, go to the spreadsheet and click File> Download As> CSV File then reupload that csv file to the Fusion Table Interface.

Geocoding the Data

Geocode the Location Column- Now that you have your spreadsheet converted into a Fusion Table, click File> Geocode and select either the column for "Location" or "Country" and let this process run while it converts the Location names into Latitude/Longitude. Networks with many members will obviously take longer than smaller networks. Setting privacy to anyone with link will allow you to embed your map into a page on your network.

Embed Map into a Page - Now you can embed your map by clicking Map of Locations>Publish and grab the HTML to embed as Iframe.

Updating the Member Map - From time to time, you'll want to repeat this process again to update the map. The best way to do this is to repeat the process and then go to File>Merge and merge the new table with your former table.

Customizing Your Info Boxes for Member Map

There are a variety of ways that you can customize the display of your map and placemark info, which I can cover in future posts, if requested in the comments below. In fact I can think of a few follow up posts which could be helpful such as Exporting the Data as KML for Google Earth, Adding custom icons, styling the info window, adding a search field...the sky is the limit! If this process looks daunting to you, I am happy to help you map your members for you for a small fee and you can send me a request through my profile.

Enjoy Creators and let me know your thoughts below...

Oh yeah.. the final result: