00:01Last month we released a new product called Community Analyst…

00:04…for anyone who wants to understand more about a community or place.

00:09Community Analyst follows the new pattern of Software as a Service, with no locally installed software; hosted in the cloud…

00:17…and a focused solution providing mapping capability with thousands of variables…

00:23…demographic, lifestyle, and business variables.

00:26To learn more about this, please welcome our Community Analyst product manager, Brenda Wolfe.

00:33Thanks, John. Thanks.

00:37I am thrilled to show you Community Analyst because I think it will really help you…

00:41…to extend the reach of GIS within your organizations.

00:44Community Analyst is an easy application designed to allow anyone to create maps and explore their community.

00:52The application comes with more than 6,000 variables including Census 2010 information…

01:00…demographic projections to the year 2015, and the inclusion of federal data.

01:06So that means I can map something such as adult diabetes rates, which is data coming from the CDC.

01:15Community Analyst makes it easy to filter and query the map so I can make areas with the highest rates of diabetes really stand out.

01:28Because I have access to thousands of demographic variables, I can quickly turn on something such as…

01:34…median household income to see how it compares.

01:39A unique feature about Community Analyst is that it comes with more than 2,200 variables about behaviors and lifestyles…

01:46…so I can map really interesting things, such as how many people smoke more than eight packs of cigarettes per week.

01:55What's nice about Community Analyst is that it allows me to drill down into the data…

02:00…so I can keep drilling down to lower levels of geography, all the way down to the block group level.

02:05In other words, the scale of the data in Community Analyst can match the scale of the decisions you're trying to make.

02:11So you can see how it's easy and fun to come into the application and start exploring all of this data.

02:16But how is this useful?

02:18Well, you can imagine with all this up-to-date data how a policy maker could use that…

02:23…to really understand the local impacts of the policy decisions they're trying to make.

02:28Or, a relief agency could use it to know where to better allocate resources after a natural disaster.

02:34So let's look at that exact example.

02:38Let's take the case of Joplin, Missouri.

02:41Earlier this spring a tornado struck Joplin, causing great devastation in that community.

02:48And as I sat watching the news, I thought, wow!

02:51How do you even recover after something like that?

02:55Where do you begin the rebuilding process?

02:58So to answer that question, I tried to put myself in the place of a relief agency trying to make that decision.

03:06Because Community Analyst is integrated with ArcGIS Online…

03:10…the first thing I did was search to see if anyone had entered up-to-date information from Joplin.

03:18And fortunately, Surdex had put up-to-date imagery in ArcGIS Online.

03:23You can see from this imagery of Joplin where that tornado cut through the community.

03:29With this image, I can actually use this to get reports.

03:33Simply by using a drawing tool within Community Analyst, I can click and draw on the map…

03:38…and outline the area for which I would like summarized demographic information.

03:46So with this area, I can order any of the predefined reports in Community Analyst…

03:51…but I'm going to run the demographics and income report because it provides basic summary information about the community.

03:57From this report for that exact area I just drew on the map…

04:00…I can see that almost 15,000 people were impacted and more than 6,000 households.

04:07So this gives me a big picture of the overall impact of the tornado, but if I were a relief agency…

04:12…I would have scarce resources, and I might want to know where to better allocate those resources.

04:17So to do that, I would want to find the most vulnerable populations.

04:22I can do that within Community Analyst by using a query by attribute tool called Smart Map Search.

04:29This tool allows me to pick multiple variables, set my search ranges for those variables…

04:35…and then it will show me all of the areas on the map that match.

04:38So to find vulnerable populations, I'm going to look for low-income areas…

04:44…that are not likely to have purchased homeowners' insurance, and now I'll see those areas in green on the map.

04:53To get information out to this community, we probably want a central location where they can go to get information.

04:59Fortunately, the Joplin Community Center was not in the path of the tornado…

05:03…so that might be a good place to send people to learn more.

05:07But I want to make sure that this location is accessible to most of the population.

05:11To do that, I can simply add a three- or five-minute drive time around that point.

05:18And given the looks of those drive times, it looks like they're covering a lot of the population…

05:22…so I would deem that as a good location.

05:24So if I wanted to share this map, or any of the maps in Community Analyst, I can do so using the Custom PDF tool.

05:31This allows me to create a PDF of my map and share it.

05:36So you can see within just a few minutes I was able to come in, do some analysis on where to allocate resources…

05:41…and explore lots of information about the community.