Right out of the box, this presents you with several significant challenges.

First, it seems that nearly every community in America (and beyond) is trying to do the same thing, so you have the problem of being heard. Plus, there is a fairly standard set of data that your prospects use to compare their potential location sites. How do you make your data set stand out? And how do you make your case sufficiently compelling to get you on the short list and perhaps even get a request for more information?

We believe the use of interactive infographics can help you.

The use of this packaging approach will certainly make your content stand out from the crowd. It also will make your information engaging and very easy to use and understand. In short, it will help you make your story far more compelling to the people you’re trying to reach.

Here are several examples that show you what we mean.

In our work with the Kansas City Area Development Council and its partner organization Kansas City SmartPort, we have used a variety of infographics and interactivity to make the work of location advisors a little easier.

KCADC Community Profiles

On the ThinkKC.com website, the KC metro area is presented as a map showing its 18 counties and 50 communities. Clicking on a city or county automatically brings up an demographic snapshot of that location, with the option to click into a more detailed description.

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KC SmartPort Trade Corridor Network

On the KCSmartPort.com website, KC’s robust distribution and logistics infrastructure is presented as an interactive system of maps that allow the user to interactively turn on and turn off different elements of the regional transportation and logistics infrastructure so they can not only see each element, but also see how the various elements relate to one another.

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Custom Report Generator

KCADC’s ThinkKC.com website uses extensive text, graphic and numeric data to present in-depth demographic, tax and incentive profiles of the KC metro area. It’s a lot of information for a site consultant to sort through, so site visitors are able to specify the topics they wish to see, and a custom report is generated automatically, which can then be downloaded as a PDF file.

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Demographic Map System

Imagine collecting data related to your region’s industries, transportation infrastructure, demographics from both a local and national perspective. That’s what we’ve done on KCADC’s ThinkKC.com Map Center. The site visitor is able to select any of these general topics and then click through a variety of data presentations within each section.

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KC SmartPort Real Estate

Having a strong portfolio of available real estate opportunities is critical to attract new businesses to your community. For the KCSmartPort.com website, we created a an interactive real estate feature that uses graphic icons to distinguish different types of properties (intermodal, logistics, buildings). Each graphic icon provides a rollover data snapshot and a link to a more detailed property profile.

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It was 1993 when Lisa and I began work on our first interactive CD program. I was a director of marketing for a national architecture/engineering firm, and Lisa was an art director for a graphic design firm.

Our initial program incorporated text, graphics, video, audio, animation and photography, and was set up to operate on a touch-screen kiosk at a transportation engineering tradeshow. I planned and wrote the content and produced and directed the audio and video programming. Lisa designed the user interface and programmed the interactivity. She also designed the tradeshow booth where the kiosk was located.

It was exciting to work on that first project, and over the next four or five years we produced another ten or fifteen more CDs.

We didn’t develop our first website until 1995 (the year Netscape went public), but by the turn of the century, with a few notable exceptions, our web work had almost completely supplanted our work on interactive CDs.

Everyone wanted to be on the web, and the web just couldn’t support rich media interactivity. So we were forced to wait for the day the two technologies merged. Well, that day has arrived, and multimedia interactivity is back.

Hitting the Target || The new ThinkKC.com website is a multi-faceted tool that KCADC uses to communicate with its vastly varied audiences. The different sections of the site provide information targeted to KCADC’s primary target audiences, which include site location specialists, the local investor community, career seekers and the media.

The site, which we developed working in tandem with a separate back-end programming group, incorporates a variety of Flash modules, extensive databases, a robust calendar application, an on-the-fly PDF file generator, RSS feeds and a content management system.

Making Flash Work Harder || A good example of how this functionality supports a recognized target audience can be found in the map of the cities and counties comprising the KC metro area. On the metro map, users can click on a city or county, and a Flash script pulls some sample data from KCADC’s city and county database into a snapshot window. Then if the user want more information, they can click to a dynamically generated page that lists the full dataset for that municipality.

Finding a Practical Solution || Another unique solution was found for the data profiles of the metro. Since the research that provides the data comes from so many different sources and exists in so many different formats, it wasn’t practical to try to put it in a database. Instead, each section of the various profiles was referenced, and a PDF generator was used to create downloadable PDF documents from the profile elements a user selects.

And one of the most interesting aspects of this project is that this site is at the very beginning of its ultimate evolution. The site’s foundation has been built in a manner that will make it easy to build on as new technologies emerge and resources become available.