Need guidance on building a map of organizations and their attributes

[JuanZamarripa]

Hello,

I work at a nonprofit and I am trying to build a map of other nonprofit organizations that offer financial services like counseling or even different types of loans, that are located across the United States. I am trying to figure out how to best present information on these organizations. We currently only have access to ArcGIS online and not the desktop version.

Users will be wanting to find organizations that offer services or types of loans they are looking for. I currently have a spreadsheet of all the organizations and all the services and products they offer. Would each service i.e. one-on-one coaching, online coaching, budget management be it's own layer? The same for financial products offered like Home Mortgage or small business loans. It does not seem efficient to have a layer for each service and product as there are a lot of options.

Ideally, the map starts out displaying all the possible organization and then something like a drop down menu on the side of the map with all the services and products listed. You would click on one them and the map changes to only showing the organizations that offer that service or product.

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated!!

Thank you,

Juan

[DavidPike]

Hi Juan. I would first of all do some data prep and make sure all your attributes are spelled correctly, same font etc.

Ensure you can geolocate these tables with an xy field, or use a geo coding service to get it from a zip code or address.

You may want to start out by just adding the CSV in, and symbolizing by what services they offer. Eg. Red dot for financial advice, blue square for legal, green triangle for legal and financial. I know this could cause alot of combinations so just keep it simple to start with, then you can look at adding a filter etc.

Get the base data sorted then build up your functionality incrementally. 

Good luck with your excellent non-profit work!

[Suzanne-Boden]

Hi Juan, there could be many ways to structure your data for mapping. A simple approach would be to have one layer of all the organizations (rows in your spreadsheet), and each product/service could be an attribute (column in your spreadsheet). You could use values like Yes, No, or NoData to indicate whether an organization offers the product or service. You also need columns that store location information for each organization (e.g., lat/long or address, city, state, ZIP Code) so they can be mapped. See this help topic for instructions to add filters to a feature layer in a web map: Apply filters—ArcGIS Online Help | Documentation. 

[JuanZamarripa]

Hi Suzanne Boden,

Thank you for your response!

I was just reading the article you shared a link for and it says you cannot add filters to a feature layer from an imported file. Seeing as the my data is coming from an imported file is there a work around for this or am I not understanding correctly?

Thanks,

Juan

[Suzanne-Boden]

Hi Juan, great question. You can publish a CSV file that you upload from a local drive as a hosted feature layer...assuming you have publish permissions: Publish hosted feature layers—ArcGIS Online Help | Documentation. 

[JuanZamarripa]

Hi Suzanne Boden‌,

Thank you! I was able to upload my CSV file and the filter button appeared and was able to create a filter. When I created my first filter it changed my map to meet the criteria of the filter but, that wasn't what I was expecting to happen I suppose. I guess what I was expecting to happen was that something would appear on my side panel giving me the option to apply the filter or not. 

Any suggestions or guidance when it comes to creating filters and how I would like to work?

Thank you again!!

[Suzanne-Boden]

Hi Juan, I think you'll want to create a web app from the web map so that your users can interact with your data. There's a configurable web app called Filter that seems like a good fit for your use case: https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=1bdcdf930b4345dfb4db10f795e0c726 . Here's an example Filter web app: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/InteractiveFilter/index.html. You may also benefit from taking this short web course (assuming you have a current ArcGIS Online subscription, this is free for you to access): https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/57630433851d31e02a43eee6/creating-web-applications-using-templ...