September 1, 2004
Mapping

By Todd Cohen

Chart a computer-assisted strategy

The Alliance for the Arts in New York City, in advance of dealing with a new mayor, started working with a consultant in early 2001 to create computer maps showing the location of the city’s roughly 2,000 cultural organizations and their dependence on city funding.

Those maps, initially intended to educate the city’s new leaders about the arts, and to limit anticipated budget cuts in the face of the economic downturn, took on even greater importance in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

The Alliance used the maps to persuade city officials that many cultural groups were scattered in smaller neighborhoods throughout the city’s five boroughs, and depended more on city funds than did arts agencies in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. Officials were persuaded to keep cultural budget cuts to a minimum at time when many other agencies suffered deeper cuts.

“The maps brought the whole subject alive for members of the city council,” said Randall Bourscheidt, president of the Alliance.

The maps also gave the alliance “a much higher level of credibility,” said Steven Romalewski, director of the Community Mapping Assistance Project (CMAP), a program of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) that prepared the maps and continues to work with the Alliance.

While computer-mapping remains the main business of only a handful of nonprofits throughout the United States, it gives nonprofits a powerful tool to improve the way they deliver services, shape policy and communicate, computer mapmakers said.

“People who don’t see the geography of a place miss one track,” said Larry Orman, executive director of the GreenInfo Network, a San Francisco nonprofit (greeninfo.org) that provides computer-mapping services for nonprofits. “Any good communication strategy comes at people in multiple ways, and having geography to add to the mix is very helpful.”

Computer-mapping technology, known as “geographic information systems,” or GIS, “lets nonprofits link places and information through very sophisticated analysis,” Orman said.

NYPIRG started using GIS during the early 1990s to create visual tools to support its community-organizing work on environmental issues, said Romalewski.

Working with a group on Long Island, New York worried about the impact of contaminated sites in a big industrial park, NYPIRG obtained data on the location of the sites and mapped them to show how close they were to homes, parks and playgrounds.

Using the maps in meetings with officials of environmental agencies, NYPIRG helped persuade the N.Y. Department of Environmental Conservation to give the sites higher priority for cleanup, Romalewski said.

The maps “helped show the agencies the community really knew what they were talking about, and so the agencies were much more responsive in meeting with them and addressing the community’s concerns,” he said. “It really turned the situation around.”

In 1997, as NYPIRG was moving to use computer maps for work on a broader range of issues, it launched CMAP, which works with 50 to 60 nonprofit clients a year, charging fees to cover most of its $500,000 annual budget.

While total fees per project typically range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, larger projects lasting several years can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

CMAP (nonprofitmaps.org) also does mapping for the NYPIRG staff, and receives support from the New York Community Trust, Long Island Community Foundation and Booth Ferris Foundation, as well as software donations from the Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands, Calif., the largest GIS software publisher, at esri.com/grants, and hardware donations from Hewlett Packard Co. in Palo Alto, Calif.

In addition to the cultural map, which the arts alliance hopes to extend to the entire state in partnership with CMAP and the N.Y. State Council on the Arts, projects developed by CMAP include the Open Accessible Space Information System, or OASIS, an effort supported by the U.S. Forest Service to map information about open-space resources ranging from community gardens to large parks.

Combining city, state, federal and private data, the maps show the relationship of open spaces to vacant properties, transportation networks, social services, demographics and other aspects of the city.

The Web-based project, which officials in Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C., are studying for possible use in their cities, also has served as a kind of meeting place for individuals and groups that use the maps, contribute and share data, and help develop new tools and information for the site, Romalewski said.

“There has been a great coming together of groups that would not have come together except for this mapping project,” he said.

Like CMAP, GreenInfo has environmental roots. The organization, which now serves nonprofits in fields ranging from public health and social services to the environment and conservation, grew out of Orman’s work at Greenbelt Alliance, a San Francisco nonprofit focusing on regional land use planning and conservation.

When he joined the group in 1976 as executive director, its staff was making “virtual GIS” maps by hand “like monks,” he said, using colored markers, blueprint maps and razor blades.

“It was very important for what we were doing that we knew geography and could show place,” he said. “And we could use these maps to build leadership” in the nine counties the organization serves.

Then, in the 1990s, teaming up with the University of California at Berkeley to use early applications of GIS software, Greenbelt Alliance converted to digital form maps it had created by hand showing land at risk of urban sprawl.

Orman started looking for ways Greenbelt Alliance could use mapping technology on its own, he said, but found it expensive and difficult to use.

“It became clear you really needed help,” he said.

Using some of the funds the U.S. Forest Service had given to several local organizations for “green space” work, along with startup funds from the Surdna Foundation in New York City, Orman founded GreenInfo.

The idea, he said, was for the new organization to support itself entirely through fees from its nonprofit clients. With an annual budget of $650,000, the organization works with about 100 clients, charging $60 to $80 an hour, with the cost of most projects ranging from $2,000 to $5,000.

GreenInfo clients use maps mainly to “show turf” and to analyze their programs, Orman said. Because they can be “overlayed” on one another, computer maps can be used to quickly make sense of data that otherwise might be hard to compare and analyze.

Several years ago, for example, a collaborative effort of the California Endowment and Rockefeller Foundation hired GreenInfo to identify geographic regions in California with the highest concentrations of joblessness and poor health. Using data tracking for more than a dozen indicators for unemployment and poor health, GreenInfo prepared maps the grantmakers used to solicit grant proposals from groups serving communities where the two problems overlapped significantly.

Once grant proposals were submitted, GreenInfo helped the grantseekers define their own geographic spheres of influence, and helped the foundations determine which groups could best address priority needs.

Nonprofits wanting to try to do their own computer mapping, he said, can look online for inexpensive mapping packages, contact a local university with a planning school or geography department, look for a consultant, or visit the GreenInfo and CMAP Web sites for information on options for using GIS.

One-time projects, Orman said, can limit a nonprofit’s use of computer mapping because its value often lies in continuing to build the database and develop new analyses from it and uses for it.

“Once groups get started,” he said, “they want all that stuff to be there year to year.”

Todd Cohen is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper at www.philanthropyjournal.org. He can be reached at tcohen@ajf.org