September 4, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Nonprofit groups can use a new online service, PolicyMap, to create maps that show important crime, demographic, education, employment, health, and housing information about the neighborhoods in which they work.
“We have loaded in almost 4,000 indicators, or pieces of information, that you can put on a map or put into a table and really get a picture of how home prices are changing in a neighborhood, what the poverty rate is, what does the population look like, what’s vacancy like,” says Maggie McCullough, director of PolicyMap.
The new tool is a project of the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit financial institution in Philadelphia that makes loans for low-cost housing, charter schools, and urban grocery stores in the mid-Atlantic states.
The organization first began to use mapping as a way to answer questions it had about its own lending.
“Over time, we started to wonder, What kinds of neighborhoods are we making investments in? Are our investments having an impact?” says Ms. McCullough.
PolicyMap includes data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Users can save the maps that they create and export them as PDF or JPEG files that they can use in reports, presentations, or other projects.
Publicly available data can be used free, but a subscription is necessary to gain access to proprietary data sets.
For example, data about subprime lending, which is collected by the federal government, is free to anyone who visits the site, but information about home sales, which is compiled by a company that then licenses the data to PolicyMap, is available only to subscribers. Subscriptions start at $200 per month or $2,000 a year.
To get there: Go to http://www.policymap.com.
