2023 Preview

As exciting as 2022 was for Grandstand and its hundreds of app partners, 2023 is shaping up to be an even bigger year. And for the first time ever we are doing a preview of some of the things in the pipeline. Here is a quick overview of where we are headed in 2023:

Geotargeting & Map Improvements

• Park & Find: Your attendees will never forget where they parked their car with the new Park & Find feature that allows and encourages your users to mark their vehicle's location on the map.
• Multi-Floor Maps: Whether you are using a graphical-only map or a hybrid map your attendees will now be able to toggle different layers of the map, including floors of a building or conference center.
• Easier Map Pin Setup: We are bringing the usability of our batch upload tool to Locations with the ability to batch addresses, latitude/longitudes, or even business names.
• Geospecific Map Notifications: App users will see their map experience enhanced with the periodic addition of in-app notifications if they are within a specific region. This means a vendor could have an ad sent to the user if the user is within a certain range of their booth. They could highlight a coupon they have available, a short-term special, or an event happening there.

Sponsorship Opportunities

• Sponsor Takeover Page: During the onboarding process of the app this optional new sponsorship feature will require your users to see an image from your sponsor. It could be a logo or even a full-page ad. The user will not be able to move on until they dismiss the ad.
• Better Control of Ad Sizing: We want to give you the most flexibility possible with your ad sizes, and a new feature will give you fine control over how your ad displays at the bottom of each of the app pages.
• New Ad Units: Look for additional areas in the app to display ads in 2023 giving you more options for how to sell the ads that you fully control.

Photo Features

• Photo Galleries: Showcase your photos with a new photo gallery feature that allows your users multiple browsing methods.
• Photo Uploads: Allow your users to submit their photos from your events with the ability in the admin to mark specific ones to serve back to all users through a new curated, user-generated photo gallery.
• Photo/Graphic Management: We are making the task of uploading photos easier with a new photo management area where you can view, edit, and delete all the icons, logos, backgrounds, filters, and more, all in one location.

Misc. App & Admin Features

• Onboarding: Take your users through onboarding screens on first open of your app. This could be as simple as setup screens for location permissions, options to tailor push notification groups, or even a login opportunity.
• Schedule Page Layouts: We want you to have even more control to make your app feel like an extension of your brand and that includes optional schedule layouts that might work better for your type of event.
• Font Library is Growing: With the recent integration with Google Fonts, we are bringing hundreds of additional fonts to our platform and soon you will be able to add any of these to your app!
• More Languages: We will be adding support for French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch in early 2023. More will be added as additional partners come on board.

This is just a small part of what we are working on and more details on each of these features will be coming out over the first quarter of 2023. Not all features will be available in all packages, but as with most of our features we always strive to make even the base packages extremely powerful and easy to use.