The Covid-19 crisis is hitting communities hard across the world and self-isolation has become the new norm. With this has come the rise of community support groups as local people organise themselves to help the vulnerable and isolated members of their own community with important tasks such as food shopping or collecting urgent medical supplies. Groups are leafleting, putting up posters and using social media to spread the offer of help within their local community and gathering responses from those in need.
Organising the response can be daunting. People needing help may live across a wide area and need differing levels of support. Volunteers need to be matched, ideally geographically to those close by and based upon the support they can offer. And let’s not forget that collating and managing personal data raises concerns about data protection.
We would like to help at Mapcite by offering free access to our products and free consulting support to any community group needing help to organise their response.
How can we help?
Mapcite for Excel is an Add-in that puts a map into Excel and lets you see your data on the map as pins. It includes an inbuilt geocoder – software that turns addresses into locations on a map. It can be used to easily plot the locations of those needing help and volunteers, making it easier to allocate resources to manage the response. And your data stays in Excel.
The Add-In can be downloaded from the Microsoft Office Store, so anyone with Microsoft Office can easily access it at this link:
Community Support Template:
If you want to go further, Mapcite’s online web platform can be used to push data and notifications to the Mapcite Mobile app. For example, this could be used to create zones or territories looked after by certain individuals and teams, with the ability to get real-time updates via the mobile app on who needs help and where they are located.
Get in touch if you need help or to find out more about how Mapcite can support community response to Covid-19.