May 2010 Updates on PolicyMap

All the data you need. All in one place. All online. | MAy 2010

PolicyMap: More data, more tools… faster than ever. If you haven’t started working with PolicyMap, now is the time. You’ll find new, varied data like election results, small business lending and religious affiliations; more essential tools like the ability to create time-series maps, an easier geographic search function and a widget that allows you to brings maps, tables and downloading to your own website. The underlying PolicyMap platform is more streamlined and efficient than ever, bringing you faster loading maps, tables, reports and analytics.

MORE FREE DATA…….Election Results and Turnout Rates for Presidential and Congressional Races in 2004 and 2008: Check out election results and turnout information for the 2004 and 2008 races for President, Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. The “margin of victory” maps provide a handy guide to who won a given county, and by how much. This data comes from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.

This data is available for free under the Demographics tab in the Add Data Layer Menu “Elections.”

Religious Affiliation: Use this county level data to see where the highest rates of religious adherents live and which denominations are most prevalent in counties across the nation. This data, from the Glenmary Research Center, was collected by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) and includes statistics for 149 religious groups.

This data is available for free under the Demographics tab in the Add Date Layer Menu under “Religions.”.

CRA Small Business Lending: Use this data to see how many small business loans were made in counties across the nation, average amounts and the percent of loans made by the largest small business lenders. Multiple years are available so you can see how lending by some of these leading lenders has changed.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate. TRF extracted data regarding small business lending activity from the Peer Small Business Data and constructed categories for viewing this data that it hopes are useful to policymakers and descriptive of neighborhoods and markets.

This data is available for free under the Lending Activity tab in the Add Data Layer menu. Look under the Small Business Loans and Small Farm Loans categories.

UPDATED! Building Permits: Annual and monthly building permit data is available dating back to 2000 and updated monthly. From the U.S. Census Bureau’s Residential Construction Branch Data, we include the number of buildings and units for which building permits were issued, total dollar value and change over time. Data is available for counties and MSAs around the nation. This data is free under the Real Estate Conditions tab in the Add Data Layer menu.
UPDATED! Monthly Unemployment from the BLS: Check out the latest December 2009 and January 2010 employment, unemployment, and labor force data for states, counties, metropolitan areas, and many cities. We update this data monthly under the Jobs and Economy tab.

MORE TOOLS……Time Series Maps: Make your own custom ranges for an indicator and have them apply to all time periods so you can easily create a series of maps showing how an indicator has changed over time. This feature is available to subscribers. See how it works.
Auto-generated Search: Start typing in a geography in the Search bar and you’ll automatically be given some options from which to select. It’s particularly helpful if you are searching for a city name that exists in multiple states or if a city has the same name as its county.

More Robust Widgets: The widget, which allows you to bring interactive mapping to your own website, lets you give your users interactive maps, ranked tables, along with the ability to download and print. To get a sense of how this works, check out our new Health Widget which includes a variety of indicators from HHS, Census and USDA. All you need to do is embed the iframe code in your web page. It can’t get any easier (copy and paste) or cheaper (free). Find the code to embed here. Easily customize the code to change the colors or adjust in any of many ways. Read our blog posting to learn how or contact us to create your own widget.

Library Licenses: Know of a library that would be interested in a PolicyMap subscription for its students and professors? Just have them contact us.

Coming Soon! Aerials – You’ll soon be able to combine the power of data and aerial photography of the neighborhoods in which you work.

May 2010 Updates on PolicyMap

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