Know your Plus Code [for NGOs] - locate your beneficiaries accurately

Monitor your social programmes - accurately

Introduction:

While Google Maps “Plus Codes” benefits all sections of a society and different types of businesses; this blog post is dedicated to NGOs. Further it focuses on NGOs working for beneficiaries living in congested areas.

(A) The Challenge:

How do you communicate addresses of beneficiaries of your programs living in congested areas when they do not have accurate formal addresses in the first place?

(B) The Solution:

Google Maps will now let India users rely on “Plus Codes“ when saving and sharing their home, office or project location addresses (digitally). These “Plus Codes“ do not depend on the street name, locality name, or town name. The code includes alphanumeric characters.

With a “Plus Code”, people can receive deliveries, access to emergency or social services, or just help each other find them.

“Plus Codes” are based on latitude and longitude. They use a simple grid system and a set of 20 alphanumeric characters. The character list purposely excludes easy to confuse characters like “1” or “l.”

Here’s an example of a Plus Code: JJXX+HR8, Seattle as given by Google.

This code can be generated, shared and searched by anyone -- all that’s needed is Google Maps on a smartphone. 

Here is another Indian example.

Please type “3275+72 Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra” and you will get the location of an NGO that I have worked with.

For knowing more on Plus Code please see the video.

Learn about Google Plus Codes.

(C) How to generate your Plus Code?

It is best explained by Google. Kindly click the google web page.

(D) The benefit:

Plus codes are very easy to use and share, a part of open source, work online or off-line and language independent. They do not include easily confused characters, are not case sensitive and they exclude vowels.

(E) Case study one:

Shelter Associates based in Pune are doing great work in this area. They map the slum data using GIS software and Google Earth. You can read a case study of what they have done for a youth living with his mother in Laxmi Nagar, a slum in the Western Indian city of Pune in a cramped one-room home with tin sheet walls and no address.

Please read the “the address of the future” case study.

To know the entire process, please see the youtube video. This project was implemented in Kolhapur, Maharashtra by Shelter Associates.

How to display your Google Plus Code

(F) Case study two:

Please click here to know how addressing the unaddressed was made possible in Kolkata.

(G) Conclusion

I urge you to use “Plus Code'' technology to implement your projects in congested areas. Your projects may cover education, health care, sanitation, emergency services in case of a disaster or natural calamity.
The benefits include transparency, scalability, serving the unaddressed effectively with accuracy.

You may want to speak to Ms Smita Kale of Shelter Associates based in Pune to know more about the work they are doing on +912024440363 or email them on Info@shelter-associates.org

(H) Another technology another benefit

I have written another post explaining another benefit of using Google technology for social sector by NGOs. Please do read it.