A university marketing officer’s brief: open days, wayfinding and procurement

The value in a campus tour is not the corridors. It is the rooms an open day cannot get twenty people into, and the applicants who are not in the city that weekend. Our one delivered university building runs 48 stations, 81 information popups and two floor plans that track your position as you move. The procurement answer matters as much as the imagery: the tour is a folder of files, it belongs to the institution, and it does not leave when your web agency does.

What one university building came to

The labs are the product

A prospective engineering student is not choosing between two receptions. The station names in this tour are the argument for it: Robotics Lab – Entrance and Robotics Lab – Inside as two separate positions, Lab 1 through Lab 5, CITHub, Library, Class A1 and Class A1 – Student View, Class B2 through E2, Admission Office. The auditorium carries three stations, two of them named for who is looking — Auditorium – Podium and Auditorium – Student View — because a lecturer and a seventeen-year-old are looking at two different rooms.

An open day cannot get a queue of visitors into a working robotics lab, and it certainly cannot get one to somebody deciding between institutions from another country. That is the gap the tour fills. The corridors exist to connect the rooms that matter, not the other way round.

Eighty-one popups took longer to build than forty-eight photographs took to shoot

This is the fact most useful to anyone planning a budget. The capture is the short part. The interpretation layer — 81 information popups, each attached to a place in a panorama and each carrying text somebody had to write — is most of the build. A 40-station hotel with no popup layer shipped in four working days. This 48-station building took two weeks. Eight more photographs, and two and a half times the working days.

So the question that moves your date is not how many rooms you have. It is how much of the building has to be explained rather than shown, and who is writing the explanation. Our rate card prices the walkthrough; writing the words inside it is quoted separately, because the scope is whatever the building needs said about it.

Four terms an institutional buyer needs before comparing quotes

Station

One 360° photograph — one position the camera stood in. It is our pricing unit and it is the only honest one, because it is what costs time. A 40 m² dense room can need more stations than a 200 m² hall.

Information popup

A marker in a panorama that opens text, an image or a link over the view. What a room is for, which course uses it, who to contact. Eighty-one of them is a small handbook.

Tracked floor plan

A plan of the building shown inside the tour with a marker that moves as you walk. On a multi-floor building it is the difference between a set of rooms and a place a visitor can orient themselves in. Two of them are built into this tour.

Distinct connection

One destination reachable from one panorama, however many arrows point at it. It is the unit analytics is metered on — €0.50 per connection — and it is roughly half the arrow count, so it is worth knowing which number a supplier is quoting you.

The procurement question nobody asks until it is too late

Institutions change web agencies. They re-tender, they re-platform, they migrate a CMS every few years. The question to put to any supplier of a virtual tour, in the tender document rather than afterwards, is this: on the last day, do we receive the files, and can we host them ourselves without you.

What we hand over is a self-contained folder — the panoramas in optimised web format, the tiles, an entry HTML file, the JavaScript that runs it, the icons, your logos and your fonts, and any floor plans the tour uses. No PHP, no database, no runtime, nothing fetched at load time from a service that could withdraw it. It runs from your own web server, from a static host, from a bucket, and offline from a laptop at a recruitment fair with no connection in the hall. When the agency changes, the tour does not.

What it costs

€40 for each of the first ten 360° photographs, €30 for each one after that, a €160 minimum, VAT on top. Tirana sits inside our 25 km free travel radius; beyond it travel is billed at cost with no markup, itemised and agreed in writing before anything is booked.

• Floor-plan positioning — €5 per panorama. Each panorama pinned to its place on a plan you already have, which is what makes the marker move.
• Floor plan drawn by us — €0.60 per square metre, minimum €45, with a lower rate for each square metre after the first 150. For a building with no usable plan.
• Extra language — €100 per language. The whole information layer rebuilt over the same capture. On a building with 81 popups it is the item that buys the most for what it costs, because the capture and the build are already paid for.
• Audio — €30 per file. Narration or ambience, one track for the tour or a different one per room.
• Analytics — €0.50 per navigation connection, plus a €50 one-off if you have no analytics property yet. Reporting into your own account, not a dashboard rented from us.
• Descriptive photographs — €10 each. Conventional stills shot on the same visit and opened full size from a hotspot.

Count your rooms, apply the card, and you have a budget line before you speak to anybody. We publish our rates in full on pricing and we do not publish what any institution paid us.

What to send before asking for a quote

1. A room list, grouped by what it is for — teaching, laboratory, library, administration, circulation. Not floor areas.
2. Which rooms have to be explained as well as shown, and who will write that text.
3. Whether you already hold usable floor plans, and in what format.
4. Which languages the information layer has to exist in.
5. Your access windows — term time, exam periods, and which rooms can be emptied when.
6. Where the finished tour will be hosted, and who administers that server.