PolicyMap’s 2013 Data Year in Review

Here at PolicyMap in our year in review, the Data Team has had an incredible year of growth—we’ve added a tremendous amount of data and new functionality.  Here’s a list of a few of the accomplishments we’re most proud of:

Census’ Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data – a treasure trove of employment-related indicators for your economic development work

Census American Community Survey and 2010 Census at the zip code level – even if you don’t know what census tract you live/work in, you probably know your zip code, so we provided our own zip code aggregations of all of our valuable Census data

Health data – we’ve quadrupled our health data offerings for our public health department users –and we’ll continue to add more in 2014

Historic Tax Credits data – we appreciate the value of historic preservation, and we know our users planning their next development do, too, so we’ve included every project completed with these tax credits

GreatSchools School Performance data—our school performance and school ranking data is updated and easier to use than ever; use it to understand strength or need within your community

Our major functionality overhaul this year included allowing our users to see all of our data at both historic (2000) boundaries and at current (2010) boundaries.  So you can see what population looked like in 2000, how it looks in 2010 (and 2011), and, best of all, how it changed in those places whose boundaries shifted.

 

Looking forward to 2014:

We have just as much on the plate for 2014, if not more.  Check back on our blog for updates in early 2014 about two new data offerings: Consumer Expenditures and new Vacancy data.  In terms of functionality, a lot of what you’ll be seeing will be much more apparent than the behind-the-scenes infrastructure work we completed in 2013.  Keep an eye out for updates on our vastly improved interface.  And let us know if you’d like to be a part of our beta testing in January, giving us feedback on PolicyMap’s new look and feel!