One of a politician’s most important responsibilities is his or her ability to connect and build relationships with constituencies, during the campaigning, working, and tenured stages. Politicians often focus their energies on particular neighborhoods or communities while they campaign and develop their legislative agendas.
Imagine what a campaign could do if it used maps to display proposed city-wide efforts, key community partnerships, and previous legislative successes, all by location. Maps can be a powerful tool to communicate a politician’s past, present, and future goals and accomplishments to his or her community.
In practice
Delivering for Brisbane, Australia
This Australian campaign map displays its legislative goals and achievements. With categories such as “Supporting our Local Community,” “Protecting the Environment,” and “Local Infrastructure,” this template helps constituents geographically and visually understand the campaign’s values and relationships within the city.
Équipe Maja pour Lachine, Quebec
The “Équipe Maja pour Lachine” party uses an interactive map to share the projects carried out during its elected period. These projects have colorful and illustrative markers showing the party’s accomplishments such as planting thousands of trees, redoing the public sports facilities, and funding a collaborative mural project, all with clickable descriptions, photos, and videos.
Nick Josefowitz for Supervisor, San Francisco
Josefowitz’s government provides infrastructural updates to citizens and marks important sites of efforts to preserve the city’s Northern Waterfront. This map plots waterfront historic streetcar routes, pedestrian-and-biker-friendly passageways, and more. This map also asks for community and public feedback, using the map as a two-way communication tool.
New South Wales Transport Roads & Maritime Services, Australia
Similar to Josefowitz’ map, the NSW government provides road and infrastructural updates to citizens, pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers via an interactive map, also using the map as a two-way communication tool through feedback collection.
Best Practices for effective political maps
Header and visuals
- Have a header that clearly identifies your politician, campaign, or project
- Select intuitive icons for your markers
- Enrich your map content with photos or videos to illustrate your projects
Organize your map content
Think about the different interests of your audience and organize your map accordingly by grouping content using categories.
Stand out
Think creatively! How can you better utilize interactive maps to:
- Spread your organization’s message
- Highlight your successes, past achievements, and future goals
- Garner and integrate community feedback
Share your map
Make sure your map reaches your audience:
- Embed it on your website
- Post it on your social media
How to use Mapme to create a political map
Mapme makes it easy to create political maps. No coding or technical skills are needed.
Using categories, you can organize your map by type of projects such as community, environment, health…
For each project, you can include a description, images and videos, and even a feedback form.
You can use the reports to analyze the interactions on the map. For example, you can find out which project generates the most interest for your constituents.
And of course, you can easily embed the map on your website and share it via social media.