Thursday, August 21. 2008

Junk Mail Mashup Reveals Rebuilding in New Orleans

AdAge explains how Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) is using "junk mail" to help map where the current residents of New Orleans reside. The nonprofit GNOCDC has been working with Valassis Communications' owner of the RedPlum direct-mail operation. Red Plum sends out basically nationwide mailings each month. By luck the company had a 2005 data with which to compare the current state of mailing addresses today. The data is being used to use funds for rebuilding and has saved quite a lot in manual surveys of "who is where."

GNOCDC has linked the data to a Google Map (James Fee and Co worked on this, per a tweet yesterday; I didn't follow up then because he noted a publication called "Adage," of which I'd not heard!). Also of note: Valassis provided much of the data at cost and the historic data and consulting gratis.

Bottom line:

Overall, the Valassis data indicates New Orleans had 146,174 households receiving mail in June 2008, still down 28% from the 203,457 receiving mail in June 2005, two months before the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane and resulting flood.

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

No comments

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry