12.14 GATHR — Discover, Participate, Connect
What is GATHR?
GATHR is an online platform that bridges cities and people through common interests in the form of flyers. GATHR is comprised of a web-based application as well as a mobile-based app. It allows the users to discover new events from neighborhoods outside their own, participate in constructing their community by posting flyers and connect with others through going to events found on GATHR.
How does it work?
GATHR: Discover Your City
Users can discover events and special interest groups around them in the form of digitalized flyers on our web-based platform. Users can search through GATHR’s collection of digital flyers through keyword search and categories. Flyer information is tagged to their event locations on a geographical map of the city they are attached to. The graphical user interface makes it easy for users to browse through the happenings in their city, according to the neighborhoods and areas they are interested in exploring.
GATHR: Participate in your Community
Through the mobile application, users of GATHR can contribute back to their community through posting events and flyers around them to the application. Using Augmented Reality user interface, GATHR is able to quickly show the user which posters have already been tagged (posters with a AR tag) and which ones have not (posters without any tags).
GATHR: Connecting you and Pittsburgh
Registered users of the app can “count me in” to events and gatherings, and quickly synchronize this information to their calendar or messaging apps (like Google Calendar and iMsg). With an intuitive and easy-to-use UI, GATHR makes it easy for people to discover the interest groups around them while making it easy to follow through with their commitments.
Why did we develop GATHR?
Through our research, we found that Pittsburghers typically find out about these gatherings through word of mouth, flyers, and social media.
However, each of these methods operate within a bubble of interaction that rely on the physical environment — for example, a event happening in the North Side might not be visible to you because you don’t visit their businesses, or don’t know people from that neighborhood.
With GATHR, we bypass these physical constraints of interaction and reinforce the benefits of physical modes of information dissemination — flyers — with the digital
GATHR takes event data that is found on physical flyers and creates an online directory where anyone can see what is going on in their city.
It helps them to get out of their bubble with publicly accessible event data that is crowdsourced and easily searchable.
Who will use GATHR?
GATHR is created for the public to create a local collage of their city through the medium of flyers. For everyday users, the benefit of using GATHR is much like that of using other crowdsourced review platforms like Yelp. With enough momentum, GATHR can act as a trusted source of local events for the neighborhoods and as an easily accessible form of advertisement for those businesses and organizations that lack advertising budget.
For local businesses, GATHR can supplement their current efforts at advertising by displaying their marketing content on a more widely accessible platform. In addition to print materials, GATHR can disseminate their marketing content to a even wider array of customers and neighborhoods.
For local gathering places like cafes and community centers, GATHR can help them keep track of the businesses they are helping to promote through the tagging function of the app, as well as act as a publicity platform for themselves. For example, posters of local events uploaded from a business like Zeke’s Coffee (East Liberty) will have Zeke’s geotag on the poster. This way, users of GATHR can discover more posters from Zeke’s through our search function, and therefore bring more awareness to this local gathering place as a result.
GATHR: Marketing Initiatives
We propose several initiatives to get the word out on GATHR. First, a grassroots marketing initiative involving locally-relevant graphical postcards and free GATHR-branded pins to local businesses to promote the platform:
Next, publicity events involving boothing at public events (like Yelp’s events and makerfaires) and social media initiatives to involve the public in our platform:
Additionally, we propose creating an analytics function for local businesses to help them track the popularity of their events and the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. For example, we propose to create a resource platform for local businesses and organizations to create their own aesthetically-pleasing marketing materials (with templates, design advice, and a design consulting service) on our platform. Additionally, we propose to provide analytics information to our users to help them gauge where their marketing efforts were most effective (for example, a lot of people saw their poster at Adda Coffeehouse as opposed to Crazy Mocha):
Further Opportunities
Through cohesive branding strategies and public recognition, we believe that GATHR can expand to other metropolitan areas that also exhibit strong neighborhood identities in the form of print materials.
