1. Do you have a logistics department?
Logistics lends itself wonderfully to mapping. If you have anything to do with logistics, consider mapping any of the following: locations of your warehouses, suppliers, delivery locations, and all possible routes. See if you can plan a more efficient route for your next distribution. What about your waybills? How about mapping a single shipment and how it got distributed over time?

2. Do you have a finance department?
Finance is another story altogether…not such an easy department to help with maps. But how about mapping where your humanitarian cash is being spent? Why not visualize where your aid money is ending up? Or to take a bit of a different perspective, why not take it one step further and map your dollar per beneficiary? Do you have geographic variability in that metric?

3. Do you have a staff safety officer?
Consider making a map of safety incidents across the region where you work. Perhaps come up with a colouring system of green/yellow/red zones to map areas of safe-to-travel, caution needed, or no-go areas.

4. Are you in the senior management team?
Consider how different maps of humanitarian needs and gaps could infuse your next strategic planning session with new questions to ask and ideas to implement. Try mapping massive people movements, results of recent needs questionnaires, or even a who/what/where map of what other organizations are doing on the ground. Make a base map of all your programme operations to include in your next proposal.

5. Are you a project manager?
Are you mapping your daily, weekly, and monthly activities…because if not, maybe you should be. Try to improve your programme implementation just by visualizing what your team does day-to-day.

6. Do you have an M&E team?
If you are concerned about programme quality and beneficiary accountability, you should be mapping results of your M&E so you can start fixing existing problems before they get too big. Your M&E results should be feeding to your project managers and management team so they have a clear picture of successes and failures.

7. What about marketing, communications, and fundraising?
If you’re a communications officer, you should be banging down the door of your GIS team so that they get you the visual maps that back up your latest story.

Those are just a few ideas. What are some of your own ideas for creating useful maps in your organization?

The post 7 Mapping ideas for your NGO appeared first on Humanitarian GIS.

So enough dilly-dallying, and here we go – a headlong dive into this project, and let’s see where it takes us.

What can you expect from Humanitarian GIS?

• Weekly Blog Posts every Saturday:  If you sign up for this website (which you should do right now – you get a free e-book on how to make a map!), you can expect an update email every Saturday with a new tip or trick about using GIS as a humanitarian.
• Responsiveness to your Comments:  I’ll commit to responding to every question and comment as best I can – even if it means pointing you to someone more knowledgeable somewhere else on the inter-web.
• Keeping the Content Focused on Beginners:  I’ll commit to you as a beginner and a humanitarian – there are lots of tools and tricks out there for GIS geeks – this website is for the aid-based project manager that’s new to GIS and is eager to learn.
• Relevant Training Material:  Including new e-books, online training opportunities, and live training opportunities from time to time, you can expect periodic updates to training materials here.

Topics of Weekly Blog Posts:

• Map-making: First off, a lot of us prefer to look at numbers and data on maps rather than static tables.  As a basic skill, you can expect more than a few blog posts on this topic – how to make your own maps.
• Data collection for GIS:  As aid workers, we all like to collect data.  But it’s harder to use and share that data if it just sits in a bunch of paper reports and never POPS out at you on a map.  So these posts will help you collect the right data, using the right tools, and link it with GIS.
• Data cleaning and analysis using GIS:  You need to be a great data manager to most effectively use GIS, so we’ll spend some time looking at how to keep your data organized and easy to map.
• Data visualization:  One of the biggest benefits of visual data is that it triggers your brain to ask different questions – questions you might not have ever asked before seeing it visually.
• Improving Humanitarian Project Management using GIS:  GIS has lots of benefits.  One of the biggest benefits is using GIS to make better decisions in the aid sector.  Whether those decisions are about security, accountability, or strategy, maps will help you out.

My First Suggestion:  Go Download QGIS

Head on over to QGIS and download it.  The software is open-source and free.  For that reason, I’ll always try to use QGIS in these posts so that it stays accessible to everyone.

My Second Suggestion:  Get my free e-book

I’ve put a lot of work into creating a detailed, step-by-step how-to guide on making your very first map.  Without any help from a GIS expert, you will learn the basics of QGIS and have a map product by the end.  All I ask for in return is your email address so we can stay connected.

And with that, have a great week, and “talk” to you again next Saturday.

The post Bring Dull Data to Life using Maps! appeared first on Humanitarian GIS.