A Great Demographic Tool To Find Out Who Lives Around Your Church

January 3, 2011 in technology,web tool with 0 Comments

In the old days, you had to order expensive demographic reports to find out who lives around your church. Specifically, I’ve used Link 2 Lead. The report costs $150 and they send you a notebook with about 20 pages of graphs and data.

Well, I recently ran into a great online tool that gives you almost as much information for a really great price…free. It’s called Mapping America, and it’s a tool provided by the New York Times.

Let me walk you through a little of what I was able to find. But first, let me tell you that this is based on census information for the years of 2005-2009. So hopefully soon there will be a recent one that covers beginning in 2010.

You can begin by typing in your zip code, which will pull up a map of your area. If you then hover your mouse over an area, it will give you some interesting information.

Here are the main things that stood out to me:

1. The area around my church has become much more hispanic in recent years

Our church is on Henderson Rd. If you go cross to the other side of Henderson Rd., it moves to 49% Hispanic, with 41% white. I should probably be really familiar with all of this, but I wasn’t because I don’t actually live in that community. I’m trying to work on that, though.

2. It’s squarely middle class

The biggest block, 31%, falls under the $30k-49k bracket. The next bracket is 24% that covers $50k-$74k.

3. Not many with advanced degrees

I also found that only 10% around the church had Master’s degree or higher.

So why is this type of information important? Because we’re called to serve people, and this helps us to understand the kind of people that live in the community. It will help you to tailor possible outreach opportunities.

You can pull up lots of other kinds of reports as well. I think it’s a great use of technology. I recommend you check it out.

What about you? Have you used any demographic reports before? What have you found?

[ht to Mark Driscoll]