Map Purpose
Most university maps point inward at the campus. This one points outward at everything around it.
Princeton University’s Office of Community and Regional Affairs built this map to show how the university reaches the communities it sits in, through teaching, research, service, operations and partnerships. It is not an admissions tool and it is not a wayfinding tool. It is the answer to a question universities are asked constantly by their towns, their states and their donors: what does this institution actually do for the region it occupies.
The university is explicit that the map is illustrative rather than exhaustive, which is worth noting. An impact map does not need to be a complete database to make its point. It needs enough real, located examples that the pattern becomes visible.
What’s on the Map
The map organises the university’s regional footprint into five kinds of impact.
- Teaching. Programmes that place students and faculty into schools, community organisations and public institutions beyond the campus edge.
- Research. Work grounded in the surrounding region, where the study site and the community are the same place.
- Service. Volunteering, outreach and the university’s commitments to its immediate neighbours.
- Operations. The university as an employer, a purchaser and a construction client, and where that activity lands geographically.
- Partnerships. Ongoing relationships with local government, nonprofits, businesses and other institutions in the region.
Interactive Features
- Categories as the argument. The five impact areas are the map’s filters, so a visitor can look at a single dimension of the university’s footprint or all of them at once.
- Geography instead of a report. Activity that would otherwise sit in an annual PDF becomes a picture of a region, which is a far harder thing to dismiss.
- A place-level story on every pin. Each location carries the detail of what happens there, turning a claim about impact into a specific, checkable instance of it.
- Shareable and embeddable. The map lives on the university’s community affairs site and can be sent to a council member, a legislator, a journalist or a donor as a single link.
- Extendable over time. New programmes and partnerships are added to the same map rather than triggering a new report.
Brand Experience & Takeaway
This is a map for a team that rarely gets mapping software: public affairs, government relations, community relations and advancement. Their job is to make an institution’s contribution legible to people outside it, and their usual tools are the annual report and the press release.
A map does something neither of those can. It shows concentration and reach at a glance, it makes the relationship between an institution and its region spatial rather than rhetorical, and it stays current. Any large institution that answers to a surrounding community, whether a university, a hospital system or a corporate campus, has this same story to tell and usually tells it in prose.
About Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey, founded in 1746. Its Office of Community and Regional Affairs manages the university’s relationships with its surrounding municipalities and the wider central New Jersey region.
See more ways organisations map their footprint on Mapme’s business impact map solutions page.