Putting Charity on the Map

Computer cartography helps groups analyze valuable data

When Gregory Reinholt became branch director at the Fox Point Boys & Girls Club, in Providence, R.I., in

1990, he wanted to find out where the children who belonged to his club lived. So he and some other staff members posted a map of Providence on a bulletin board, and began marking members’ addresses on the map with brightly colored pushpins.

More than a decade later, Mr. Reinholt is executive director of Boys & Girls Clubs of Providence — and he has put away the pushpins. Instead, he now turns to electronic mapping to analyze where its members live. One of the organization’s maps displays the clubs’ membership data against census information to show what percentage of the city’s young people are involved in club activities.

Boys & Girls Clubs of Providence saw that it was doing a good job of reaching young people in some neighborhoods, but was less successful in other areas of the city.

Mr. Reinholt says being able to see those patterns allows his organization to think more critically about recruiting and to ask itself, “Well, who should we be having conversations with to be able to reach more of the kids who live on, say, the West End of town, where we’re really not serving a lot of kids?”

He adds: “We really couldn’t have gotten our hands around the data ourselves.”

Computer-mapping software packages, often called geographic information systems, or GIS, enable organizations to analyze complicated sets of data and turn that information into maps. While environmental groups have been using computer maps since the early 1990s, other types of charities have only recently begun to experiment with the technology. But as more of them have, they have found that mapping can be a powerful tool to help them communicate their message, persuade policy makers to take action on an issue, and make sure that their services are available to the people who need them most.

“Maps show patterns; lists don’t,” says Randall Bourscheidt, president of the Alliance for the Arts, a research and advocacy group that promotes the arts in New York.

Arts Groups in New York

Last year, the alliance had a set of maps made to analyze the locations of the city’s cultural organizations and their sources of financial support. The study’s most important finding: The further an arts organization was from one of the city’s business districts, such as Wall Street or midtown Manhattan, the less likely that group was to receive money from corporations or foundations, and the more likely it was to depend on city-government funds.

The alliance then used the maps to put together a briefing book for members of the New York City Council. Because the information was displayed geographically, the alliance was able to generate maps that detailed the cultural organizations in each council member’s district. Mr. Bourscheidt says the maps helped the alliance convince the City Council to restore some money to the Department of Cultural Affairs that the mayor had recommended for cuts in his budget proposal for fiscal 2003 — although a shortfall in city revenue did lead to a 9.5-percent mid-year budget cut in November.

The Community Mapping Assistance Project, in New York, created the maps for the alliance. The project, part of the New York Public Interest Research Group, is one of a handful of nonprofit organizations dedicated to providing mapping services to other charities.

Another potential source of assistance for nonprofit groups interested in mapping is the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. This collaboration, coordinated by the Urban Institute, in Washington, includes member organizations in 19 cities that have built advanced information systems that integrate data on neighborhood conditions, such as education, health, housing, and poverty.

One participant, the Advanced Policy Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, has created a Web site called Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles, which makes it possible for anyone to create maps using the housing, demographic, and other information the institute has collected. Community-development groups use the site’s data on abandoned lots, housing-code violations, and property-tax and utility liens as an early-warning system to identify neighborhoods where financial conditions are starting to deteriorate.

Some nonprofit groups have turned to urban-planning or geography departments at universities for help on mapping projects, while others have decided to invest in their own computer-mapping capacity.

While the price of GIS software and the powerful computers needed to run it have dropped significantly in recent years, charities that choose to go it alone still face significant costs to train employees in how to use the complicated software, say nonprofit mapping experts. And, they ask, what happens if the one person who knows how to use the system decides to leave the organization?

In 1995, Larry Orman founded GreenInfo Network as a nonprofit group to help other charities set up their own computer-mapping systems. But as he saw the difficulties many organizations encountered doing data analysis and mapping on their own, GreenInfo Network began to focus more and more on doing the mapping for charities. He thinks large organizations with extensive mapping needs might want to employ staff members to handle the job, but he recommends that other charities think very carefully before they try to do it themselves.

Finding Useful Data

Nonprofit organizations also face the challenge of finding the information they need to complete mapping projects — and they discover that the quality of the data that they do find, and their compatibility, can vary.

When the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance — a coalition of more than 300 organizations promoting environmentally and socially responsible development of New York City area waterfront — was creating a map to show public-access points on the Lower Hudson River, the organization found out that the data it was looking for were organized by political jurisdiction, rather than by natural boundaries. So the organization had to use information from both New York State and New Jersey, as well as local municipalities.

On the other hand, Mark Denil, director of conservation mapping at Conservation International, worries that sometimes charities get so wrapped up in the number-crunching that they don’t spend enough time thinking about how to convey the information in the maps clearly and forcefully. Conservation International uses maps to show where animal and plant species are located, and what parts of the world are losing big chunks of forest.

“Maps have to be self-contained, and able to speak for themselves,” he says. “It’s very easy to make a map that someone just coming upon it would either not understand what you’re trying to tell them or misinterpret it.”

Gilda Haas, executive director of the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice, in Los Angeles, says that it’s important to remember that mapping is just a tool — but a potent one, if used thoughtfully.

Just south of downtown Los Angeles, the Figueroa Corridor is a 40-block strip between UCLA and the Staples Center — the arena where the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team plays — that is undergoing rapid redevelopment worth billions of dollars. The coalition is working to make sure that the money being spent benefits local residents, rather than displacing them.

As part of its efforts, the coalition created a map that shows land-ownership patterns, business-improvement districts, and points of contention over the development plans. Ms. Haas says she uses the map every day — whether she’s talking with residents and civic organizations or city officials and private developers. And she says it is one reason that the coalition was able to negotiate a multimillion-dollar community-benefits package with the LA Arena Land Company that included investments in low-cost housing and parks and a requirement that employers hire neighborhood residents.

By combining the coalition’s map with a well thought-out organizing plan, says Ms. Haas, the coalition was able to change the way people thought about development in the area.

“The Figueroa Corridor on everybody else’s map is this little skinny thing where it’s all commercial property, and then we have a big fat map, and it’s got 200,000 people in it,” says Ms. Haas. “We changed the parameters of the discussion.”