Diagram showing free and paid tools available to social impact organisations looking to map their data, roughly arranged by expertise required.

Software Tools and Support for GIS mapping

By Shruti Grover, Design Research Lead at Hetco Design Ltd

We at Hetco have been commissioned by Catalyst to lead a five-week rapid research project to develop a new tool to support the social sector to derive value from mapping their datasets. 

We’ve been speaking to a number of UK charities to understand their experiences with mapping and the software tools they prefer using. We have learnt that there is a broad range of online and desktop based software in use, some favoured by those starting their mapping journey, others being used in charities for complex geospatial analysis. The map below shows the wide range of free and paid tools available to social impact organisations looking to map their data, roughly arranged by expertise required.

Diagram showing free and paid tools available to social impact organisations looking to map their data, roughly arranged by expertise required. You can contribute to this list here. 

Operational Maps for Beginners

Two tools were favoured by those creating their first maps, Batchgeo and Google MyMaps. Both of these allow for organisations to map data about their assets and service users as points on a map. These tools provide a great starting point if you want to get started mapping. Findthatpostcode and Doogal can help you look up which local authority your postcodes are in, administrative boundaries, and area classifications. These clever and free tools make it very easy for a beginner to create a useful map which can be embedded on a website. 

An example of such a map is the Food Support in Croydon Map created by volunteers at Croydon Volunteer Action. It contains the locations and services of food banks across Croydon, and highlights the borough boundary. This makes it easy to understand which geographical areas are underserved. This map is currently used to signpost people who call the food helpline to their closest food bank.

 The Food Support in Croydon map, created using Google My Maps and Doogal.co.uk

This easy-to-use suite of tools can help create maps for local advocacy, thus representing the needs of beneficiaries and/or organising campaigns.

Getting Started with Google MyMaps

If you would like to start mapping for your organisation, follow these easy steps:
Create a spreadsheet of the places / people you want to map. Make sure at least one column has addresses with postcodes. Save the spreadsheet as a .csv file. Import the file into google maps and style the icons as needed. To add the ward/borough boundary – go to Doogal and paste the postcodes relevant to your organisation, download the ‘postcode areas in KML format (for use in Google Earth)’. Finally, import the KML file into Google My Maps as an additional layer.

For additional information and support reach out to Superhighways – who offer training and also host several free resources on how to get started.

Strategic Maps for Confident Beginners

Tools to help understand communities

We found that most of the social impact organisations we spoke to were either already using maps for strategic purposes – such as understanding the vulnerability of their population to COVID, or making a case to a funding body for a new grant – or were interested in doing so. Many had an interest in the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). The IMD is the official measure of relative deprivation for small areas in England and the online tool helps organisations understand how their service locations compare with the rest of England. 

There are two tools available to start using the IMD: Consumer Data Research Centre’s tool and Local Insight.  Consumer Data Research Centre’s tool helps you to look at various datasets including the UK’s broadband hotspots and ‘notspots’, locations of GPs and pharmacies, and much more. Local Insight offers analysis across multiple indices, and you can screenshot the relevant data to present to funders. They also offer more in-depth profile reports and the latest services data (including hospitals, GP practices, and dentists) for bespoke areas at the click of a button on the paid version.

If you are interested in socio-demographic or health data, Open Audience and Local Health are the tools for you. Open Audience connects postcode data to census data and you can download relevant graphs to use in your own reports. Local Health is a Public Health England tool, which contains health-related data, visualised in maps, charts, area profiles, and reports at ward or clinical commissioning group levels. 

 Local Insight (L) and Open Audience (R) displaying information about the same postcode (W14 9XH)

Tools for data storytelling and creating dashboards 

There are several different tools available for data storytelling and visualisation, including Flourish, Tableau, PowerBI. Flourish is favoured by 360Giving. All of these tools offer visualisation without any coding. Shorthand is a digital storytelling platform. 

Beyond this, are several tools for intermediate and advanced users which we are not covering in this blog, but are mentioned on the map. If you are interested in this space, please do help to keep the landscape map updated! Here is the live version.

This project was funded by Catalyst as part of the Data Collective.

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  1. Pingback: Community Lens: A tool to learn about the needs of UK communities – Data Collective

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