"It has been extremely helpful to plan at the speed of conversation. From a consumption perspective, maps are a format that works well. Most people do better with maps than tables, especially when decisions involve place-based work that needs to factor in the built environment. They resonate, they process well, and allow conversation to keep flowing.” — Sebastian Schreiner, Impact Data Officer
See how PolicyMap can help your organization.

Challenge

United Way's investment strategy is built around a set of community indicators tied to specific well-being outcomes, and decisions about where to direct limited resources need to be underpinned by solid community-level data analysis. When the organization began planning new Family Resource Centers, neighborhood hubs designed to support families with young children, the team needed to weigh a variety of factors including population density, economic security, child density, school locations, and transit access alongside child maltreatment risk data that lives outside PolicyMap entirely. Comparing multiple possible service areas against each other, and adjusting those areas as new indicators came into the discussion, required a tool flexible enough to keep pace with the pace of a series of live conversations.

Solution

PolicyMap's custom regions feature lets United Way build, compare, and reshape geographic options on the fly, so that as leadership talks through priorities, the underlying data adjusts with them instead of requiring a follow-up analysis. For the Family Resource Center initiative, this meant layering population and transit data directly into the live conversation and testing several neighborhood options side by side. PolicyMap also supports the team's needs assessments and grant applications with data-backed insights. In one case, the team used PolicyMap's population density data to walk county partners through a HUD crosswalk methodology, explaining how zip-code-level 211 helpline data can be mapped into census tract estimates. Across these uses, PolicyMap functions less as a system of record and more as a decision-support tool that turns data into a format people can process quickly, without slowing down the conversation.