Join VoiceMap’s second webinar for a conversation with tour operator Jo Eckardt, who started A Friend in Berlin after she moved back to Germany from New York twenty years ago.
Jo taught German at NYU, and also worked for the UN, but Berlin is her favourite city, and while she showed everybody around herself in the early days, her company now has a team of guides offering tours in eleven languages. Jo is also a psychoanalyst, an author and – of course – a VoiceMap publisher.
The first of Jo’s tours was published in 2015. She didn’t publish another one until October 2022, then she published six of them in twelve weeks – and at last count, she was on eleven. Jo was inspired by how much easier it had become, and all the ways in which VoiceMap’s tools and processes had improved over the years. But she was also really clever about using the structure of a tour to her advantage.
If you zoom all the way out, you’ll notice that Jo’s Berlin tours connect in a sequence, so that listeners can start one exactly where another ends. This takes them on a long loop through the centre of the city.
If you zoom right in, to individual locations, Jo’s approach to writing the scripts for her tours stands out. Instead of trying to free up hours or days at a time to work on them, she takes them one location at a time, whenever she has a 20 or 30 minute gap in her day. The average VoiceMap walking tour only has 28 locations, so if you can get into a cadence of doing at least one location a day, you can get through them pretty quickly – even if that isn’t quite as quickly as Jo!
Jo will be talking to Gary Morris, our Head of Content. There’ll also be an opportunity to ask both Jo and Gary your own questions about producing VoiceMap tours.
The webinar is open to anyone, but you need to RSVP here. We’ll send you a calendar request with a Google Meet link when you do.
Duration: 45 minutes
Date: Thursday, 22 June
Time:
- 15:00 CET
- 14:00 GMT
- 09:00 EST
- 06:00 PST