Mapping your partnerships

Workforce Developments contributor Racy Ming at the Marin Employment Connection, the Marin, CA, one-stop, sent me the Google map she's created of MEC's local community partners:

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If I've embedded it properly, when you click on a blue marker information will pop up showing the address, phone number and website for each partner, plus a photo of the location. (Click here to get to the map in Google if it's not working.)

A simple map, but a powerful collection of information. You probably have a list of your partners somewhere, maybe in Word or Excel, or even on your website. Think how much more useful it could be to customers and clients if they saw it in a map like this.

Here's what Racy says:

Feedback from the partner agencies has been extremely positive. Based on their requests, I added hyperlinks to each of their websites and their physical addresses, so that the information shows when they click on a tab. I'm hoping this gets people thinking about other ways they can use Google maps to make their lives easier.

Comments

[Blair]

Bronwyn -- Thanks for sharing Racy's work. At our research center, the Center for Creative Community Development (www.c-3-d.org), we've been working on some google mapping tools in a similar vein (although for the cultural sector rather than the workforce development field). You can check them out at http://www.williams.edu/Economics/ArtsEcon/mappages/MACLAMap/network.htm . We've also gotten positive feedback from the organizations we've done this for as part of our grant-funded research.

[Bronwyn]

Thanks for the link, Blair.

I especially like being able to overlay other data, the way you've done with census data. Did you do that in Google maps?

[Blair]

The census data appears in the form of image files laid onto google maps; in other words, the raw census data is not built directly into the application right now. Which limits some of the functionality. You can't, for example, click on a location on the map and retrieve the detailed census data for that particular block group or tract, which might be interesting. In time, perhaps we can provide that functionality. But it's still pretty powerful.