Problem: How can we reach new audiences to educate or persuade them about current issues, show them opportunities for access to services or offer them a chance to support our work with donations?

Solution:  GIS allows you to place individuals’ locations on a map, through a process called geocoding (where each address is assigned geographic coordinates in relation to the street and home or business number). Once geocoded, these individuals (for example, members of your organization) can be color-coded by certain factors (how long they have been members, amount of recent gifts, interest in certain issues).

These addresses can then be selected by their proximity to other places. A school district might take its elementary school parent/family list and select those who have indicated an interest in volunteering and have children in second to third grade who also live within a half-mile of their school, in order to encourage more active volunteering. Once selected in GIS, the list can be exported instantly to a mail merge program for sending out tailored letters to those families. 

This analysis can be made more extensive by assigning additional information to each member based on census or zip code data, which contains general information for an area (not about the particular person, however) and allows you to rank the likelihood of any person having those broader characteristics – for instance, you can attach median house values from census block groups (about 6-10 square block areas) to each person and build a more useful profile of that person or family.

Here are some examples of using GIS to focus on key audiences:

• Showing respondents to an opinion poll (top right)
  
  
• Showing agency members for an after-school training organization (right, middle)
  
  
• Identifying people who may have been exposed to toxic releases from a refinery accident (right, bottom)
  
  
• Calculating where volunteers might live in relation to schools that need help with elementary school programs (bottom left)
  
  
• Analyzing voting patterns by precinct to see where there is support and opposition for a statewide (or local) ballot measures. Example is from California Proposition 50 park bonds for the 2002 election, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. (bottom right)