Economic Development

Esri Nonprofit Specialty: Enabling Nonprofits to Use GIS for Greater Impact

Esri Nonprofit Specialty

Blue Raster is a proud member of the Esri Nonprofit Specialty. Partners receive this Nonprofit Specialty designation for their alignment with and their knowledge and expertise of Esri’s Nonprofit Organization Program. Additionally, we demonstrate experience with projects in many nonprofit industries: conservation, humanitarian, disaster response, food security, community development, racial equity and social justice, health research, and more.

Esri Nonprofit Specialty

The Esri Nonprofit Program provides nonprofit organizations low cost licenses and access to a Esri's vast offerings of location intelligence tools and training. We are proud to support a wide variety of nonprofit clients in using these location intelligence tools to help inform decisions and shape programs that meet the needs of their constituents. Receiving the Esri Nonprofit Specialty designation is an exciting next step in furthering our mission to help nonprofit and NGO clients achieve their goals.

Nonprofit Experience

Blue Raster has deep expertise developing platforms for managing and disseminating geospatial data and analysis to support conservation efforts with the Esri ArcGIS platform. Since our founding in 2002, we've had the honor of working with over 70 nonprofits and NGOs. For example, we work with leading nonprofit conservation organizations including the World Resources Institute, the Jane Goodall Institute, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation Society, NatureServe, National Audubon Society, Stimson Center, and more.

Nonprofit logos

Blue Raster continues its commitment to bringing the latest in geospatial technologies to leading conservation, global development, humanitarian & disaster response, social justice, and health research & advocacy organizations.

“We look forward to expanding our work in the nonprofit sector as part of this Esri specialty,” commented Michael Lippmann, Principal/Founder of Blue Raster. “Our team thrives on helping organizations make connections between data to better communicate and power their impact.”

Esri Nonprofit groups

Are you a nonprofit looking to better utilize your data?

Contact us today to learn more about the Esri Nonprofit Organization Program!

Nonprofit Specialty

Keeping Sacramento Moving

Sacramento Transportation Priorities Plan

The city of Sacramento, CA was going into a planning period for how to spend transportation budget to improve how citizens got around the city. Sacramento spans more than 100 square miles and is made up of more than:

      • 1,800 miles of streets
      • 250 miles of bike lanes
      • 78 miles of shared use paths
      • 43,000 streetlights

Not wanting to make decisions in a vacuum, the city looked to crowdsource input from citizens to inform their investments.

Crowdsourcing Portal

Engineering firm Fehr & Peers worked with the city to prioritize and develop plans. They turned to trusted partner, Blue Raster, to develop a portal that could capture all of the needed input in a user-friendly way. The team developed a one page interface that asked citizen to rank potential projects in terms of their importance. The mobile-first design ensured people would be able to access the site on their preferred device.

The site sets up the question like a game – If you had $42 million/year to invest in transportation, where would you spend it? Survey participants are presented with six categories of improvements:

      • Air Quality and Health
      • Connections to Places
      • Equity
      • Maintenance
      • Safety
      • Technology

Citizens then drag a slider next to each category to show what percentage of money they would allot to each area. As they make their choices, the page shows how much money they have left to spend and summarizes the outcomes their choices prioritize.

Mobile app
Mobile app details

Transportation officials can view the collected input in dashboards for a quick view of the community’s priorities. They can sort responses based on various demographics or other criteria to help inform specific investments. Plans based on this input will be developed and presented to the community.

Explore Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the USA with The Draper Innovation Index U.S.

Following the launch of the Draper Innovation Index (read about it here) in March, Blue Raster is excited to announce the launch of the US focused Draper Innovation Index U.S. (DII U.S.) available at index.draperhero.org.

Built using ArcGIS Hub, ArcGIS Dashboards, and ArcGIS StoryMaps, the DII US includes three major scenarios: Balanced, Tech Innovation Environment and Regulatory and Tax Environment. These scenarios weight six sub-indices, providing a look at state performance in a variety of categories.

Continuing the partnership that launched the global Draper Innovation Index, the Draper Hero Institute, Blue Raster and Esri collaborated on the project.

 

“The ability to drill-down and understand the Draper Innovation Index at a more granular sub-national level is essential to understanding which states could be a good environment for innovation and economic investment,” said Salim Sawaya, Lead for location intelligence technology provider Esri’s Nonprofit & Global Organizations Team. “Esri and our partner Blue Raster continue to support the Draper Hero Institute find and use authoritative datasets for their US states index so that investors and innovators can leverage the power of location intelligence through GIS to identify the states that hold the most potential or promise.”

 

About Draper Hero Institute

Founded by legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur Timothy C. Draper, Draper Hero Institute (DHI) provides applicable and modern resources for future entrepreneurs globally and ensures inclusiveness and opportunities for all.

Tracking Trends of Innovation and Entrepreneurship with The Draper Innovation Index

Draper Hero Institute, Esri and Blue Raster team up to launch the Draper Innovation Index

Founded by legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur Timothy C. Draper, Draper Hero Institute (DHI) provides applicable and modern resources for future entrepreneurs globally and ensures inclusiveness and opportunities for all.

A key example of one of those modern resources is the recently launched Draper Innovation Index.

The Draper Innovation Index is a Hub for ArcGIS site that contains several ArcGIS Dashboards and a StoryMap that displays key success factors, metrics, and indicators that support the performance of local startups and facilitate the creation of new jobs and economic prosperity, such as employment creation, VC funding, startup culture, tax regulations, and IP creation. Additionally, it provides innovation data from an entrepreneurial/VC perspective as opposed to others that exist from an academic point of view.

Draper Innovation Index

When Esri looked for a partner to take over the project after they had built the initial Hub, Dashboards and StoryMaps collection of tools called the Draper Innovation Index – they tapped longtime collaborators and Esri Gold Partner Blue Raster on the shoulder.

The Draper Innovation Index (DII) was initiated by Draper Hero Institute as an index consisting of a series of data indicators on the state of entrepreneurial activity, environment, and drivers – nationally and globally. Under the leadership of Program Manager Phil Satlof ; GIS Analyst Mary Bracho and Visual Designer Manny Fleurival adapted and enhanced the Hub and tools and participated in the global launch event on March 25th, which was covered by the Wall Street Journal.

 

With our goals to create a global index to foster the development of innovative technology and economic growth, Blue Raster and their team seamlessly achieved our vision. They transformed the complex data metrics and analysis into a user-friendly, visually aesthetic interactive tool. With the successful launch of our global index, we are excited to share this leading-edge tool with the world.” — Vivian Lufkin Executive Director, Draper Hero Institute”

We are now preparing for the launch of the USA Index on May 27th! Check index.draperhero.org for more news.

Draper Innovation Index

Bringing Transparency to Transboundary Water Policy in the Mekong River Basin

From its headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau, the Mekong River runs through six countries, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia before reaching the ocean. Over 60 million people live in the Mekong watershed and rely on its natural resources and fish and agricultural products produced here are shipped throughout the world. However, recent evidence indicates that the operation of new upstream dams constructed in China are changing the natural flow cycle of the river, affecting downstream communities.

mekong dam monitor

In spring 2020 a U.S. State Department-supported study by independent researchers at Eyes on Earth published a study showing that the upstream dams restricted enormous quantities of water in 2019, while downstream areas were experiencing an unprecedented drought. The newly launched Mekong Dam Monitor builds on that research to provide unprecedented transparency of the flow of water and conditions of dams and reservoirs along the Mekong River. The application was developed through a partnership between the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program and Eyes on Earth, Inc with funding from the Mekong-US Partnership, and the Chino Cienega Foundation.

The Monitor includes multiple tools and indicators in a single platform, giving a comprehensive near-real time view of the current state of the Mekong basin along with historic conditions. Users can explore detailed information about dozens of dams and Impact Areas, including viewing satellite imagery, weekly reservoir level (meters above sea level), and inundated area, all estimated from remotely sensed data in the Virtual Gauges page. One tab over, the Lancang Cascade visualization shows the weekly state of water retention and power generation in each of China’s 11 upstream dam cascade. Just two dams in the cascade, Xiaowan and Nuozhadu can collectively hold nearly as much water as the Chesapeake Bay.

The Natural Flow Model visualizations leverage analysis by Eyes on Earth that predict the expected water in the Mekong River based on temperature and precipitation data derived from satellite imagery. These values are compared to actual flow rates measured at two locations by the Mekong Water Commission. The expected and measured flow rates diverge starting in 2012 with extreme differences in 2019 and 2020 when very little of the expected water from the rainy season passed the downstream gauges.

Additional data on climate anomalies, such as precipitation, snow cover, and temperature allow users to compare current and historic maps from 1992 to the present. Finally, the Basin Wide Dams and Connectivity page builds on the success of the Stimson Center’s Mekong Infrastructure Tracker Dashboard and provides comprehensive information about hydropower development in the region. This includes information about dam developers, financers, energy generation, and more.

mekong river basin

The Mekong Dam Monitor was developed using the Esri JavaScript API and leverages data hosted in ArcGIS Online as well as ArcGIS Image Server.

Nearly all data shown in the Monitor is available for download for transparency. With this tool, stakeholders and policy makers will have a greater ability to anticipate environmental and social impacts of dam operations, adopt evidence-based policies for managing the Mekong River, and participate in transboundary river governance.


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