PolicyMap Provides Extensive Demographic Information

If your business or organization is planning a move to a new area, or perhaps planning a project in a part of the country that you know little about, services that provide general but extensive demographic information about the location are a windfall. Non-profits looking to set up shop where they're most needed, or businesses looking to relocate their corporate headquarters to cities with highly qualified candidates all turn to services like PolicyMap to provide the type of demographic information they need to make intelligent decisions. PolicyMap collects information on over 4,000 indicators for areas around the country, including real estate, jobs, education, income, and energy, and makes the information available to everyone from civic and non-profit organizations to developers and government agencies.

PolicyMap's free trial allows you to search by city or zip code and see a little more about your neighborhood, even select a few filters to learn more about your community. Even so, services like PolicyMap aren't generally aimed at individuals, although a civic group or city council could likely learn more about their locale than they might know using a service like PolicyMap.

When one of the companies that I worked for considered moving its corporate headquarters about 50 miles north, the executives had to weigh several important factors including room for growth, affordable building space, and whether or not they would be able to attract highly qualified candidates for the company. Granted, services like PolicyMap collect aggregate data and statistics on education and real estate, not individual academic careers or home values, for example.

The service provides information on a number of different categories, including neighborhood conditions, education, money and income, jobs, and energy. If you drill into any of these categories, you can pinpoint more specific information. For example, in the real estate category, you can see both home sales and home values and how they've changed in the area you've selected. Similarly, the jobs category has information on unemployment, employment by industry, and industry concentration.

Policymap allows you to search by a number of geographic factors, from congressional district to census region, and subscribers to the service can create custom regions along major roadways that might indicate where people move on a regular basis. Additionally, as subscribers search and uncover information they find useful, PolicyMap allows them to export that data into reports that can be saved and analyzed later.

PolicyMap is free to use, but to unlock a number of features like uploading your own data and creating custom search areas, you'll have to sign up for a premium account. If you're not looking for a lot of information, or just want to see some interesting statistical information for your community, a free PolicyMap account will work for you. If you're an organization looking for more in-depth information, the standard account will work best for you, at $200/month or $2000/year. If your business would like to upload custom demographic information to the service and create custom reports, premium accounts are licensed on a per-user basis and cost tens of thousands of dollars.