IFF: How One Subscriber is Using PolicyMap

PolicyMap was born from TRF’s belief that good data ought to be an important part of smart investment decisions. With the development of our PolicyMap tool, analyzing, mapping and reporting on hundreds of different regional and national data has never been so simple. Organizations ranging from government and foundations to nonprofits and corporations use PolicyMap to find up-to-date and relevant business intelligence, couple it with their own data and share information with others.  

Among them is IFF, a peer CDFI serving the Midwest. Faced with the complex task of identifying areas where its resources can create the most impact, IFF needed a medium that would allow them to more readily and efficiently visualize loan activity. An early subscriber to the PolicyMap service, IFF has used the tool to load information about all of its loans and real estate projects onto one user-friendly platform. With a dynamic consolidated dataset right at their fingertips, IFF has the ability to better examine the neighborhoods in which they are investing and gather detailed information about individual projects based on location and type.

To increase public visibility, IFF also uses PolicyMap to make data concerning their lending and investments more widely accessible. The fund has three PolicyMap widgets on their website at www.iff.org – one showing their projects in the Chicago area, another in St. Louis, and a third in Milwaukee. These widgets operate as interactive maps that allow visitors to the IFF website to pan around, zoom, and click on points to learn more about individual IFF projects.

“It is tremendously important in today’s world to have quick and easy access to mapped data,” explains Moira O’Donovan, a Research Project Manager at IFF. “We at IFF believe that resources – whether for education, health care, or other human services – should be targeted to where they are most needed. PolicyMap is the dynamic tool that allows us to assess these needs across our communities, thus supporting our internal business planning and our funders and government officials in making better decisions about policy and resource allocation.”