Community First Fund is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), an SBA guaranteed lender, and have received a high rating by the CDFI Assessment Rating System (CARS®).

Community First Fund has more than 16 years experience in providing loans, business training, and one-on-one counseling to entrepreneurs of all sizes, affordable housing and commercial real estate developers, and community groups in under-served communities in central Pennsylvania. We serve 13 counties with offices in Lancaster, York, Harrisburg, Reading, and Exton.

Check out the PolicyMap widget (here) which depicts all loans financed by Community First Fund since 1992 in their thirteen county region in south central and eastern Pennsylvania. These 855 loans total $36,141,712.86. The widget allows visitors to the website to explore the diversity of loans and the impact they have had across the region. Each loan is represented by a colored circle. By clicking these circles, users can learn more about the individuals the Community First Fund serves.

Learn more about widgets and how you can add a fully interactive map of PolicyMap on your website, click here. We have also created plenty of free widgets for you to add to your website right now! See what free widgets are available here.

It’s now easier for you to create time series maps so you can see how an indicator has changed over time. As a subscriber, just log in, create your custom ranges and click “apply to all time periods”. As you toggle through different time periods in the legend, you’ll see that your custom ranges stick allowing you to compare one map to the next. Select Save and this series of maps will save to your MyPolicyMap account. Here is an example using Median Home Sale Prices in Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA.

Welcome to our series on helpful tips for PolicyMap. With over 10,000 data indicators and many online features, we hope our series can help users better utilize PolicyMap. For a complete training, please join a free online session here: Click Here

Did you know, building a custom region in PolicyMap gives subscribers the ability to create their own unique areas on the map, and then build reports for those areas. Subscribers have always had the ability to draw a custom region right on top of the map; these custom regions can cross predefined geographic boundaries like census tracts, zip codes, and counties.

Now users can draw a radius around an address or assemble a grouping of boundaries – like block groups, census tracts or zip codes – to create a custom region. To use these features, click the “Build Custom Region” in the bar along the bottom of the map and choose one of the three (3) types of custom regions: Drawn, Assembled, or Radius.
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Keys for editing the widget URL

What is a widget? Widgets are customizable instances of PolicyMap maps with dynamic features such as the ability to zoom into or pan across a map, click on an area to view the underlying data or toggle between additional data layers and points of data.

Each widget is completely customized to our users’ needs. Users can decide the default location, type of datasets to display, and boundaries to overlay. Within the URL of the PolicyMap widget, there are commands which allow some basic customization of the widget, and outside the URL are customizations for the frame of the widget. Some of these customizations are only available if the widget was originally designed to have the feature.

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PolicyMap 2.0 – Analytics: The new Analytics feature is now available to subscribers! This revolutionary neighborhood search tool will allow you to find neighborhoods that match up to 3 criteria on a map and generate a list of resulting places. Use the tool to answer an endless number of questions such as:

“Where are neighborhoods with low educational attainment rates and low household incomes, but close to mass transit?”

“Where are high poverty areas in close proximity to a mass transit stop and in good school districts?”

“Where are older homes in low vacancy areas that might be most in need of weatherization assistance?”

and more!

This feature is a major breakthrough and one we think policymakers and professionals will find invaluable. For those of you involved in deciding where and how to spend unprecedented stimulus dollars or how to allocate limited resources, you now can easily search for, find and then target neighborhoods where intervention could matter most.

Watch a video demo of PolicyMap’s newest feature: Analytics

TRF’s PolicyMap Unveils Version 2.0

Upgraded Online Mapping Site Lets Users Layer and Compare Data

(Philadelphia) May 11, 2009 – TRF’s PolicyMap (www.policymap.com) today unveiled version 2.0. The newest version of this revolutionary website provides quick and flexible analysis of neighborhood-level data nationwide. At subscribers’ fingertips now are answers to questions relevant to job training (e.g. Where are neighborhoods with low educational attainment rates and low household incomes, but close to mass transit?), housing (e.g. Where are high poverty areas in close proximity to a mass transit stop and in good school districts?), energy (e.g. Where are stable communities with high utility costs, potentially most in need of home weatherization assistance?) and more.

With PolicyMap 2.0, those involved in deciding where and how to spend unprecedented stimulus dollars or foundations deciding how to allocate limited resources have a quick and flexible tool for searching for those neighborhoods where intervention could matter most.

“With the introduction of PolicyMap Analytics, TRF’s PolicyMap can reshape how policymakers use data and maps to understand the markets in which they work,” said Jeremy Nowak, President of TRF. “PolicyMap is the simple, fast, and efficient platform that many are demanding to guide policy decisions and help strategically allocate resources.”

PolicyMap subscribers can find those neighborhoods that meet up to three criteria from more than 4,000 data indicators related to demographics, real estate markets, education, employment, money and income, crime, energy, and public investments. TRF aggregates data from a variety of public and private sources including U.S. Census, Claritas, FBI, IRS, the Postal Service, and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Additional PolicyMap 2.0 functionality lets users rank data, download public datasets and provides for an extraordinary level of
customization.

“PolicyMap offers tools both for us as the investor and for the organizations that we support, offering both of us the detailed neighborhood data to plan for real impact,” said Lois Greco, Senior Vice President and Evaluation Officer, Wachovia Regional Foundation.

Nearly 150,000 people have used PolicyMap since the site launched just under a year ago. To date, PolicyMap has more than 11,000 registered users. Its varied subscribers include the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia, foundations such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, public agencies including the New Jersey Housing Mortgage Finance Agency, private entities like Comcast as well as nonprofit community organizations nationwide. PolicyMap is a 2009 finalist for CNET’s Webware100 award.

About TRF’s PolicyMap

PolicyMap is an online mapping tool that makes it quick and easy to gather and analyze geocentric information. PolicyMap is a service of The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a not-for-profit leader in the financing of neighborhood revitalization. TRF developed PolicyMap to empower decision makers with better access to credible market and demographic data. To see how PolicyMap Analytics works, check out tutorial address. To learn more about PolicyMap, visit www.policymap.com.  To learn more about TRF, visit www.trfund.com.