As a national organisation it’s important for us to understand the geographical spread of our programmes to ensure that we’re reaching as far as possible. However, looking at rows and rows of anonymised address data is both impractical and boring so we’ve started doing it a new way.

Mapping out applicant locations on an interactive map enables us to see where they are based in a much more exciting and simple way, and it’s really easy. To map out the address data like this we needed to convert it to a format the map could understand. Geocoding (interesting article on the Guardian about ithere) takes the address data extracted from our application reports in excel spreadsheet format and converts it into a longitudinal and latitudinal number which can then be mapped on to an open source mapping software such as Google maps.

There are a multitude of programs out there that can do this online and for free. For our programmes we’ve used a couple of different platforms (batchgeo.com, mapalist.com) to test out what we needed.

We’re always looking for new ways to share our data in useful ways so if this is something that interests you please get in touch.