One BandMgrX feature that Sugar Still uses A LOT is the “Max Radius” search to find venues within “x” miles of a specific point, let’s say within 25 miles, or 50 miles, or 100 miles. This is particularly helpful when we’re planning a tour, as we can quickly see how many venues we have entered within 50 miles of Phoenix, or 100 miles from Denver, or 25 miles from Chicago. Then we can email them quickly using the Email Tool and FormLetters, or we can use the PasteTools in the “Utilities Menu…” to quickly research and enter a bunch more venues if we’re thin in any given region.
The Max Radius search is fast and can even search in miles, kilometers, nautical miles, or radians. Hahaha, why not, right? One of our goals is to tour through the Bahamas by boat one day.
The Max Radius search tool uses latitude and longitude coordinates for each contact in the Contacts table to complete its search, so one thing we needed to figure was how to get those latitude and longitude coordinates entered onto each contact record. Enter Google and the Google Maps API. As you enter new contacts you can use Google to enter the the latitude and longitude for you automatically based on the street address. It’s pretty sweet, but to get it to work reliably you need to get an API Key from Google. The key is free (up to 2500 queries a day), and if you already have a Google Mail account you can get your key in about three clicks. Here’s where you go to get your free key:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/get-api-key
Once you have your API key, copy and paste it into the BandMgrX preferences screen and you’re all set. BandMgrX has a way to grab the latitude and longitude for each Contact record individually, and a way to loop through a whole bunch of records and update them for you unattended (as long as you’re connected to the internet). If you already have a contact list, you can import the list into BandMgrX and let Google fill in your latitude and longitude coordinates for you overnight while you sleep for example.
Here’s a short tutorial video that shows you how we use the Max Radius search tool.