NeighborWorks America in Philadelphia

The PolicyMap team is enjoying having NeighborWorks America in Philadelphia for their national training institute (NTI) and conference this week. Maggie McCullough and Katie Nelson participated in sessions earlier this week and will be talking about PolicyMap as part of a session tomorrow entitled “Using Data and Technology to Drive Strategic Decision Making in Real Estate.”

For the last year, we’ve been working with NeighborWorks’ Success Measures to enable neighborhood organizations to analyze the results of their community surveys geographically. By geocoding survey results, groups can begin to see if households with similar neighborhood opinions are clustered in certain blocks – and if those blocks are somehow different compared to the surrounding area. Pulling from the variety of indicators available in PolicyMap at a block group level, neighborhood organizations can see, for example, which areas have higher concentrations of people under the age of 18, which have aging housing structures, which have higher median incomes and more. Our goal has been to give them a geographic tool for evaluating survey data so they can integrate the results into their decision making process going forward.