Problem:  As a foundation program officer, I need to know where to target my grantmaking – how can GIS help me?

Solution:  GIS can help private and community foundations in three ways: 

• Define Grant Programs: You can use it to define the geographic extent of issues you are concerned about and the service areas of organizations who are responding to those issues (in order to determine who is more engaged, where groups are engaged and whether there are overlaps of programs). 
• Show Grants:  GIS can help you depict your grantmaking, to explain to other staff, to boards and trustees and even to the public. By placing grant information on a map, viewers can quickly grasp your areas of concentration. 
• Help Grantees: Finally, you can use GIS by helping your grantees have access to it as a critical tool – you can fund data efforts that gather and distribute key sets to many groups, you can fund individual groups with GIS capacity, and you can fund collaborative efforts that provide GIS services to several groups at once (often a very efficient approach, as good GIS often takes a significant investment for any one group). 

Examples of foundation mapping and analysis include:

• Tracking technology grantees year by year (right, top)
• Defining service areas for potential grantees (right, middle)
• Illustrating community foundation geography (right, bottom)
• A series of maps analyzing community demography in relation to grant making (bottom)