Onboarding your team

The teams that land Pin Drop smoothly all do the same thing: they get the workspace ready before the team arrives. Aim to have three things in place first.

• Your data imported and verified. If your locations live in a spreadsheet or internal system, import them in bulk rather than recreating pins by hand. Spot-check names, addresses and tags across regions, and resolve anything flagged in the Duplicate Pins panel (under Organise on the web app).
• A tag scheme that reads at a glance. A pin takes its colour and icon from its first tag, so decide which tag family drives colour — usually status or region — and keep the ordering consistent. Turn pin labels on by default so new users can read the map without tapping anything.
• Roles defined. Decide who needs full admin control and who needs a focused, simplified app. See our guide to roles and permissions for how to lock this down.

Team members join by invitation, using their work email address. Each member occupies a seat on your plan.

Rather than inviting everyone at once, start with a small pioneer group of your heaviest users. Let them work for a week or two: they will surface setup problems while the audience is small, and they become your internal champions when the wider team arrives. Then invite everyone else, with a short heads-up from you so the invitation email doesn’t sit in a spam folder.

Pin Drop signs users in with an emailed link rather than a password. If someone can’t sign in, it is nearly always one of two things: they used a different email from the one invited, or the sign-in email is sitting in spam or corporate quarantine.

Keep the launch session to about 30 minutes: five on why (one map, one source of truth), twenty of live demo, five for questions.

• Demo a real day’s workflow — find a location, open its pin, update its status, log a visit — using real locations your team knows.
• Demo from a team-member account, not your admin view, so what you show matches what people see on their own phones.
• Have a one-line answer ready for every hidden feature. Someone will ask about a section they’ve glimpsed that you didn’t cover. “That’s an admin tool for X — you won’t need it day to day” is enough.
• Ask everyone to sign in before they leave. Adoption drops sharply when setup is left for later.

Watch the first week: who has signed in, who hasn’t, and which questions repeat. Fix data problems quickly — a wrong address or a stale status erodes trust in the whole map. A week in, round up the questions you’ve collected and answer them once, to everyone.

If you’d like help planning a rollout, get in touch — we regularly help teams with imports, tag design and launch sessions.