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ReUse Orgs Survey

Table of Contents

Summary

Review a sample about 60 nonprofit ReUse organizations across the county to do market research.

Over the past few years, I worked with a team of community members to create a new nonprofit, Cortland ReUse. We wanted to assess the practicality and growth potential of the idea. By comparing our city and county population, poverty statistics and annual revenue of existing reuse organizations, we were reassured that reuse can be successful in any community.

Web

See the ReUse Organization List at Cortland ReUse.

Coding Notes

I haven’t put the code into github,yet. The work was done way back in 2021 and it needs to be updated. Here’s the basic steps:

  1. Create a spreadsheet of selected ReUse Nonprofits with manual web searches and APIs (eg. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/search.json?q=reuse)
  2. Geocode the city, state (get latitude/longitude) using python Geocode library with GeoNames.
  3. FCC API to get Census codes by lat/lng.
  4. Census API for basic demographics
  5. Import final spreadsheet into WordPress and used Pods plugin to generate lists on website. The final spreadsheet was uploaded to Google Maps to select by geography.

This data was useful for other purposes, too. With URLs for similar nonprofits, I could do a quick scrapy/robot to see what tools other folks used to make their websites. And, by collecting sitemaps, we could get a survey of programs offered at similar organizations.