 Okay, hello everybody again. Welcome to Geocoding for Legislative Advocacy. My name is Kyla Hunt and I'm the facilitator today. I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global. And with me today are Abby Fritz and Thomas Taylor. And Abby, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Sure, thank you Kyla. My name is Abby Fritz. I'm a project manager for Xavier's political elections and redistricting teams. I work for Xavier, which is a software development company based in Philadelphia. And again my team, all of our projects focus on politics elections and redistricting. Okay, thank you Abby. And Thomas, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Sure. Hi, I'm Thomas Taylor. I'm Director of IT with the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. And we use Xavier for a couple of different tasks that I'll be talking about later in the presentation after Abby gives a thorough overview of Cicero and the API. Awesome. Thank you so much. And just really quickly before Abby goes ahead and gets started, I did want to send you a bit.ly link for the Cicero Legislative Information API which is available through the TechSoup stock page. And that is bit.ly for Cicero API. And so if you are interested in learning about the API that we will be learning about today or looking more into getting access to it, that is where you would want to go. And I will also be sending that bit.ly out to everybody following the session. So with that, just a little bit about what we are going to be talking about today. Again, Abby is going to be talking about Cicero and Xavier and how you can use that for geocoding and legislative matching. And then Thomas is going to go into a little bit of a case study for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. So Abby, take it away. Great. Thank you so much. So I'm going to get started by talking a little bit about what Xavier actually does. We are a, like I said before, we are a geospatial software design company based in Philadelphia, PA. We are a small shop, about 26 people. We specialize in web-based geographic analysis and modeling applications. Our clients range from government, local, state, and federal governments as well as a lot of nonprofits and academic clients. We primarily develop geographic web and mobile software and offer geospatial analysis services. Our main goal is to enhance the decision-making processes that a lot of these entities face and help them solve complex, interesting, and novel problems. Our work is not domain-specific and includes things as political advocacy, land conservation, cultural resources, urban policy analysis, et cetera. We work with a number of sectors where we work with social and human services, arts and humanities, elections and politics, et cetera. Our work with nonprofits is pretty extensive and ranges both from doing actual analysis of data that a lot of nonprofits have in-house but don't really have any way of analyzing or getting extensive information from their data. So we do one-off projects. We've done a number of projects with local advocacy groups, arts organizations, as well as with the local government to try to get as much as they can out of their data. We also work with a lot of entities to create web-based applications, web and mobile-based applications. You see a few examples on your screen here, and I will be getting into that a little bit more as it relates to the Cicero API. So what does Cicero do? I don't know how many of you have signed up for a Cicero account or have read a bit about Cicero on the TechSoup website, but I'm going to go through a couple of the key points of the Cicero API. The first thing that the Cicero API does is geocoding. Basically, you are passing your addresses in your address database through the API, and I'll explain more specifically what an API actually is in a bit. You pass your address to us. We have a geocoding service that stamps each address and assigns it with a latitude-longitude coordinate point. So these are map points that specifically describe where a particular address is on the map, and we stamp your address with that coordinate point. Now that coordinate point allows us to do the next step, is matching that coordinate point, very specific point, to a legislative district. The Cicero service is unique in the world of district matching services in that we do use address-level geocoding. Address-level geocoding is as specific and precise as you can get. A lot of services use zip code matching, which basically means that they are matching the zip code from a particular address to the zip code, all of the zip codes in a particular legislative district. This can get a little bit messy, and I'll explain that in a bit because a number of zip codes aren't actually all contained within, neatly contained within a legislative district. So if you can match a specific point to a legislative district, that will get you much more accurate results. The next thing the Cicero API does is provide you with, if you are interested, again all of the services that the API provides you with are optional. So if you are interested in displaying a boundary map on maybe your website or internally in an internal application that you have in your organization, you can do that by requesting a map for each of the districts that are returned to you. This map is actually a very simple JPEG image that is geotagged to a map, and you can overlay that over Google Maps or Bing Maps or any of the other widely available web map applications that are available. Another aspect of Cicero that I like to talk about is the actual data that we have in our database. The Cicero collection of data is huge, and it's growing. We are continuing to grow it every day. We are adding additional locales, new types of information. The first major type of information that you can access with the API and stamp all of your addresses with is legislative districts. We have a huge collection of spatial or map-based data that describe a legislative district boundary. We have local legislative boundaries for 100 of the most populous cities in the U.S., so that includes city councils, a couple county councils as well, supervisorial districts, these kinds of things. We have full coverage for states in Canada, state legislative districts in Canada, as well as the United States, and Australia. We have federal level data for the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. And this is continuing to grow. Like I said, we entertain requests from people for specific information. We will often have nonprofits that call us and say that they are doing a particular action in a locale that we don't have information for currently. And if the data is available, we can add it to the API to be used for a look-up. We have elected official information as well, so anytime you make a request and you get your districts back that match your addresses that you've submitted, you will be able to also then access the elected official contact information for each of those districts. So if you are requesting local state and federal data, we will pass you back the district IDs. And we can also, with a second call to the database, can also pass you back all of the elected official information, including the name, primary and secondary contact information, phone, fax, email address, URL. And you can use all of this information in whatever way you would like. If you want to populate a database that you have, or if you want to do a call to action campaign, for example, this information is really valuable for your end user to be able to put them in touch with the appropriate people. We also have election data. Our election data database is actually both historic. We're collecting historic election data as well as future events. So we collect election events that describe the date, what the election is actually for, where it is located with appropriate URLs that describe the election event, official URLs for that particular election. This information is accessible by all of you. It also really helps guide us in keeping our database up to date. We have reminders that come up with all of the upcoming election events, and this helps our team stay up to date, enter people as they are elected into office, and switch them over to be accessible to you as they take office. We also have a data set that not a lot of people are aware of, and we would love to make more people aware of it as it is an extremely useful set of data. We have non-legislative district data. Now, non-legislative district data basically requires the same type of information that legislative district data does. We gather map files or boundary files for non-legislative data such as watershed boundaries. So we have watersheds for the entire United States. We also have counties, school districts, and police districts for several cities in the U.S. And really anything that has any district that has boundary information available, it can be plugged into the CISRO API on our end and made available for district matching and address lookups for the end user. We've had a couple people very interested in the watershed boundary data and doing district matching and address lookups against watershed data because of actions they want to take. They are advocating for particular environmental action in a specific watershed. They can figure out which of their constituents or followers or people that they're reaching out to are actually located in that watershed and then target their advocacy and their political actions around that information. So this non-legislative data is very useful in segmenting your constituent database into categories of people that you would like to reach out to for particular actions. The next section I'd like to talk to you about is House Throw is different from other district matching services. There are in fact quite a few district matching and elected official lookup tools available whether through an API or through kind of a web-based piece of software. Several of the major CRMs that are available that you may be using have certain components of district matching and geocoding available. We're going to talk through a couple of the pieces that kind of differentiate to throw from these other services and explain a little bit more about what the strengths of to throw are. The first big one like I had mentioned before is address versus zip code district matching. As you can see on this slide, we took a district in Philadelphia and are showing you that District 181 and 175 are neighboring districts. When you're doing geocoding based on a zip code, you're basically assigning the coordinate point to the center of that zip code. Now if that zip code doesn't is split by a particular district and as you can see the zip code 19123 actually falls in two districts, it will try to match based on that one point but that may be the wrong district. As you can see the zip code centroid is in 181 but the actual district is 175. Again, we are one of the very few people who are conducting our district matching based on address alone. A second set of points about the differences of to throw and other district matching tools, the accuracy and reliability. We are a geospatial software design company and actually Cicero is kind of an unusual project for us. We don't often create our own data or manage our own data. We are using non-profits or other organizations data and analyzing it. The Cicero API however, we have gathered a lot of legislative data for many of our elections projects which was kind of the starting point for us. We have a team of spatial analysts, GIS analysts actually, and political data specialists now in-house and that team continues to grow and they are continually updating the database with new information. Like I said we track our general and special elections around the world and add new information, update elected officials based on those elections. So we have a dedicated team for the Cicero API and the data structure behind it. The third piece is actually a very timely piece. If any of you have been following the redistricting process you'll know that it can be a very contentious process and can last a fairly long time. Each state after the decennial census takes a new population count and has to apply that to their legislative districts and come up with new redistricted legislative district plans to accommodate the shifts in population. This does not happen in one meat kind of batch process. It happens piecemeal across the United States at the local, state, and congressional level kind of throughout the year following the census release of data. We have a lot of people have come to us saying, well I can look up the current boundaries and I can match my constituents to current boundaries but what do I do about future actions? I am doing an action that I know is timed pretty closely to the new legislative boundaries taking effect and I would like to know ahead of time what districts my constituents will be, will belong to. In order to meet those needs we have actually developed a second call, a second type of data that you can look up. So we have current boundary data, legislative boundaries currently in use, and then we have a second call, 2010 data call that is basically all of the legislative boundary plans that have been approved, officially approved by the states or local entities, but will not take effect until their next election. There are several states that had to do their redistricting very early because their next election was very early. New Jersey is an example of this. They have released their plans. They will be in effect fairly soon. The second boundary set that I am referring to is not full coverage of the United States yet but we add to it as those plans become available. So for instance if you are in a particular state, say New Jersey, those plans have been approved. We have them. We have incorporated them into our look up tool and you will be able to match your constituents to both current boundaries, current districts as well as the districts they will belong to when the new legislature takes effect. Again, that is useful to people if for a number of reasons depending on the types of actions you are taking. Now, the big question that a lot of people ask is, so what exactly is an API? This is a little bit of text speak, but an API is an application programming interface. This means that it is basically a simple language used by one program, so your CRM or your database, to communicate across the web with another web-based program which in this case is our CISRO database. This very simple language enables software developers to design tools that are powered by data hosted elsewhere. So this basically takes the responsibility of hosting this huge database of information, maintaining it, updating all of the elected officials, also you as the consumer or as the organization using the tool, and puts it on us. We host the service and we can quickly and easily, almost instantaneously, serve up this information to you as soon as you make an API call or hit. These are terms that are used interchangeably, basically meaning you tap us on the shoulder and ask us for the information through the API. People use the API to interface with a number of different applications, and the API language is designed to communicate very simply with a wide variety of pieces of software. So it's not limited to communicating only with your website, your organization's website, or only with your organization's CRM, but if you are using any other type of software that is storing this information, it's most likely that you will be able to communicate via the API with our database. I have a very simple infographic that does a better job of explaining this visually. Basically, as you can see here, number one says, your application sends a request to us for districts, officials, or map images. It goes through the cloud. The cloud is another catchphrase, kind of a very popular phrase at this point that a lot of people that you may be hearing about basically means that all of this information is stored on the web somewhere in kind of a cloud infrastructure of servers. So everything is stored but accessible to you. We make it accessible to you via these calls to our service. It's then processed, geocoded, processed through all of the elected official information, and we send it back to your application without you organizing anything on your end. As soon as the API is integrated, your software developer has integrated this into your system, you can hit a button and it will return information to you. The next piece is a question that we get fairly frequently as well. Who can integrate an API? What level of technical expertise does somebody need in order to use an API? There are a couple of questions I usually ask people. If you're comfortable using a command line, if you know what it is and are comfortable using a command line, you will most likely be able to integrate an API into your software. The second question, have you ever used an API before? Are you familiar with them? Most software developers or web designers have used APIs before. They're very, very common. They're becoming much more common as a way to communicate and access different web services. The third question, do you have some software programming knowledge? Again, you don't have to be a Rockstar software developer, somebody who can develop complex software. It's a pretty simple language, but you do have to have the basic tenants of software programming kind of understand them. If you don't meet these requirements or can't answer yesterday's questions, then there are a couple of people, I know a number of our partners and clients have used a number of different resources in order to integrate the API one time, and then they don't need to use those resources again after it's been implemented. We have several people who have used their web designer. Advanced web designers would be able to integrate this into your website. Also, software developers, if you have somebody on your staff or if there are a lot of freelance contracted software developers who would take on a project that would be kind of a one-time project to set up an API and make sure it's ready and running for you. And then you can continue to use it. A final question, what can your organization actually do with SysRow? So there are a plethora of ways to use the SysRow data. We actually have a really impressive array of those uses in our client base. I really like hearing stories about how people are actually using the data, and it really surprises me sometimes, ways that I wouldn't have actually anticipated the data being used. The first is probably the most obvious. On your website, I'm sure many of you have encountered lookup tools before where you type your address in and you get results, whether it's you type your address in and you get the closest pizza place to that address, or you type your address in and you get some other type of information back. I've been to many advocacy websites that request your address or your zip code in order to give you back information about who represents you, who represents your address. We have a number of different use cases for this and I wanted to highlight one of our partners who has used the API this way. The first is a project of actually of Common Cause, Pennsylvania. Common Cause PA has developed this website called Our Philadelphia and you can go to it at ourphiladelphia.org. It's a website that they wanted to create to provide Philadelphians and actually goes a little bit beyond Philadelphia to the region, provide people access to information and resources necessary to create an open, honest, accountable local government that serves the public interest. They're very interested in being able to enable people to find information that they may not have easy access to otherwise or they'd have to dig for a little bit and make it available as soon as you can click the mouse when you enter your address. So this first screen shows the address entry tool and all of the information that people get back. Now you see there are a lot of officials here in Philadelphia. We have a number of at-large representatives as well as district level representatives. The second screen shows an example of some of the input that our Philadelphia has incorporated into their app. So as you can see, you've gotten the information back. You can see a small map with a map image of the district for this particular person. The very nice thing as well is that they have integrated with other APIs information that we at the CISRO API don't actually provide. So for instance, you can see on the right hand side there's a section called Build Sponsored. That actually is using a separate API that accesses based on the district or the person's ID, all of the bills that they have sponsored in the past. So the very nice thing about APIs is that you can use multiple APIs in one application to kind of build a customized tool that you want that really meets your very specific needs for your organization. A second way that this was a great story when I heard it. I was very excited that somebody was using the API this way is to disseminate news by district. So we got a request from the Oregonian which is a local newspaper that serves the Greater Metropolitan Portland area in Washington, sorry, Washington, Oregon, the Oregonian, sorry about that. So they have a tool in which they wanted to actually get their news, kind of filter it down based on a number of different APIs. The first API is the CISRO API that they're using. And as you can see here, you enter your street address in your city and you find your representatives. Now, those representatives in their news articles are tagged with the name and the district ID. So then the person gets the results back after having looked up their representatives and they are able to filter based on news. So they get a news feed, only news articles that are tagged with their representatives ID. The same goes for tracking a bill. And if you actually go to the site, gov.organlive.com, you'll see that they have quite a few options for political articles, different ways to look them up. A third way you can use an API or use the information that you get back from CISRO is to create website mashups. And this kind of goes back to what I'm saying about using multiple resources, multiple sources of information in one application. One thing that we've done internally is create a website called Redistricting the Nation. We do a lot of work around redistricting information. Because of the CISRO API, we have a lot of really great information, great spatial data, legislative districts, these kinds of things. And we've been able to use those districts to do further analysis around redistricting, how compact is a district, how gerrymandered is a district. We use the CISRO API for our website to provide a lookup tool for people to find their districts. They can then do further analysis using another data set that we have in-house, that we developed in-house to analyze that particular district and see how compact it is and to learn a bit more about the actual boundaries of the district that they live in. Another way you can use the CISRO API is to integrate it with your database. A lot of people manage their constituents or their members in an internal CRM contact management database. I have a screenshot here of what we use internally, which is Salesforce, and this may be familiar to many of you. You can integrate into many of these CRMs. They have different plugins that you can use to integrate with APIs. And you could potentially add fields to each contact or each lead that represent the districts that belong to that particular address. The final discussion I'd like to cover is how you can use this for your advocacy. You can use it. It doesn't have to be web-based after you've made the calls across the web to the CISRO web services. You have that information in hand. You can then take that information and create additional reports, reporting maps. I'd like to just emphasize a couple of these maps that we've created or clients and partners of ours have created using the information that they are able to glean from the CISRO API. The first is the Utility Emergency Services Fund. It's a local organization that is a nonprofit organization that assists low-income Philadelphians with emergency utility assistance. They wanted to go to City Council and request more funding for their projects. They wanted to show City Council where in each district their recipients of their services lived. These were useful tools for them. They actually printed the maps out and had a huge display for City Council. Several City Council members commented on how much of an impact that visualization actually had on their decision-making process. They were able to show exactly how effective their outreach was which districts were covered, which districts were not, and draw some additional conclusions about their services that they may not have been able to do without the visualization. Additionally, we worked with the Wilma Theater locally in Philadelphia. Again, we used the CISRO API to stamp all of their constituents' addresses and figure out which zip codes they belonged to. This enabled them to profile who their typical attendees were to their performances and then find, using census data and several other databases that they had access to, figure out where a similar profile type lived in the city and conduct their outreach or future events based on that information that they got back from these maps. The third and final report I wanted to show you, we worked with MapLite.org and OpenSecrets.org, both good government watchdog groups, to do an analysis of campaign contributions from outside of a particular person's district. We used the CISRO API. We geocoded all of the campaign contribution addresses and were able to then figure out the ratio of in districts versus outside remote locations for campaign contributions. Just a couple examples of how this information can be used kind of as a one-off for one-off project, for analysis projects, projects that give you a little bit of a better understanding of your actual constituents or members of your organization or projects that really help convince people or show people, illustrate to people where your organization is doing a lot of work and having a really big impact. At this point, I would love to open it up for any questions anybody has. Kyla, do you want to take over at this point? Sure. We did have one question that came in a while ago, so I'll go ahead and read that. But anybody who has questions, please type it up into the chat pane and I can read them to Abby and after Thomas' section as well, we'll be opening it up for questions again. So Abby, Jay had asked, can you tell us what your source for the reference address data is? And he's saying he assumes it's some commercial source. But from what my understanding is, it's really just the organization's source that they're putting it in. So I'll address a couple things. I'm not sure exactly what that is. The question is asking, the addresses that you pass into the API are your own. The way the geocoding service we are using is a commercial geocoding service. It's something that we've vetted. It's one of our business partners actually. And they are kind of the premier mapping and geocoding resource out there. Their name is Esri. They have one of the most up-to-date geocoders. They keep all of their information extremely up-to-date. So for instance, if in a particular neighborhood there is a new development, oftentimes that new development won't make it to mapping services right away. So if you have a member that lives in that new development and you go to the geocoder address, and it won't give you a result because there is no address listed there. Esri does a really good job of keeping up-to-date with us. There are always kind of random pickups related to that kind of thing where as map data changes. But we very much think that this is probably one of the best geocoders out there. So that gives you really good results. And then I hope that answered the question. I'm not entirely sure if you were asking about address service in relation to geocoding. No, I think that totally answered the question. And I was also wondering, I mean this is just something that I wonder every time that an organization is stamping their own databases addresses if there's any privacy concerns, if anybody has ever brought that up. I'm assuming not, but I was just wondering if you'd ever heard of anything like that. Absolutely. So when you are passing, we don't store any of the address information that you pass to us. So you're basically hitting the geocoder. It's giving you back information, but we don't store that internally. So that information isn't sitting around somewhere. The only time we also do batch geocoding, which does not use the API as you've integrated it with your software, there are organizations that don't necessarily want to integrate the API. They just want a one-time project. And in that case, they will pass us an Excel document or some other database format with all of their addresses. So they will actually email that to me or mail that in to me in whatever format they feel comfortable with. We will then process it in-house, stamp it with the coordinate points as well as the districts and any district information they want and pass it back to them. Some people have asked about security with that. We go to great lengths to get rid of all of the remaining databases and database stamp-in that we do. And we do have privacy in terms of use agreements that we can sign as well when it comes to keeping those addresses private. Okay, great. Ivy asks, can you talk more about work using Cicero and school districts? Sure. So a couple of people have been very interested in stamping their information with school districts only because – so one example is an education advocacy group in Pennsylvania is actually using it to do actions around school redistricting. So if they can then stamp all of their members with the school districts they belong to and then they are able to decipher which members actually belong to a particular school district that they are doing an action around. I'm really interested in kind of hearing what people think it could be used for, what this kind of non-legislative information particularly school districts could be used for. I think there are a lot of ways of using it to both segment your constituents by school district but also do kind of analysis of where resources are going, maybe stamping a grants database, grant recipient database with school districts as well to kind of see where grants are going or do that kind of analysis. It would be very interesting. Okay, great. With that I think we'll go ahead and give to Thomas. I believe he's back in the line and if he wants to drop I will unmute him one more time. So Thomas just give me one second. Nope, I'm here. Great. Thanks very much. No problem. So I work with the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and we approached Xavier a number of years ago when we were trying to solve a problem that we'd been working on for a while which was how we could do online advocacy like so many organizations do but target it at our local officials. The Cultural Alliance is an organization that has over 400 member organizations, arts and cultural presenters in our region and we provide membership services. We provide advocacy and research for the sector and then we also do some collaborative marketing and professional marketing development for our member institutions. But this was really around our advocacy and research efforts. In Philadelphia, like some but not all municipalities in the U.S., we have actual legislative districts within the city of Philadelphia and this is a map of what it looks like. So we wanted to be able to, just as when you're using one of the advocacy tools like Democracy in Action Salsa or Convio or Blue State Digital or there's a few others, people can log in there, they can give their address and they'll be matched to the correct legislators. We wanted to be able to do that for our city council people and I would talk to various vendors and they would say, yes, we have local data. Absolutely. And then it would turn out that what they meant was somebody could log in and get a list of all the city council people in Philadelphia but they couldn't be matched to a specific district and often that data was of pretty poor quality anyway. So, Azavia had done some work actually for the city of Philadelphia to build some mapping applications and so they had the know-how and the information and so we worked with them to, so we worked with them to build a service that we then integrated with the Get Active advocacy software. So, they built the API and then we worked with Get Active to incorporate the API into their online advocacy product. Get Active was subsequently acquired by Convio and we've now switched over to Democracy in Action Salsa and again worked with Democracy in Action to integrate the Cicero API into their product and it's actually now available, they've made that available to all Democracy in Action Salsa subscribers. You can choose inside of Salsa, I think you probably have to contact the folks at what's now called Salsa Labs to get that turned on but you can choose to use Cicero data and Cicero legislative data matching for your constituents. So, that's the main thing that we've been doing with this Cicero API is driving folks to contact the correct City Council legislators when we've needed to call them to action around funding issues, other cultural asset issues in our region. But we also on behalf of our member institutions do research and advocacy sometimes very specific to that organization and so this is a sample of a piece of work that we did for one of our member organizations. Art Reach is a local organization that brings together social service organizations that serve impoverished and physically disabled clients and they help those service organizations provide access to arts and culture to their clients and so they were meeting with legislators and wanted to be able to demonstrate their impact and so we were able to get from Art Reach a mixed list of the arts groups that they work with and the social service groups that they work with and put it all on one map that they could then share with the legislators that they were meeting with and this is a specific map that we developed for one of the U.S. congressional districts that covers about half of Philadelphia and a little bit of the suburbs. So that's been a great advantage to working with the Cicero API. And then sort of generally we've been really fortunate to have Cicero and Azavia in the region. What Azavia did was they took our very sort of narrow use case for Philadelphia and having built the surface just having built the surface just generalized it and added tons more data to it that made it so much more useful to so many other organizations and so that's really been amazing to see how they took this little idea and made it so successful for themselves and for so many other organizations. So one of the projects that they were actively involved with that I wanted to highlight this sort of demonstrates their value to the community is the FixFillyDistricts.com. We were in redistricting season and one of the first things that came out after they started looking at all this legislative district information was there's some really badly gerrymandered districts. Sorry, I went to the wrong slide there. There's some really badly gerrymandered districts in the country but as it turns out especially in Philadelphia they actually developed an algorithm that scores legislative districts for how gerrymandered they are based on compactness and contiguity and so they actually found that our seventh city council district is the worst gerrymandered district in the whole United States. You can see that it includes a little bit of turf up here and then sneaks along like one or two blocks and then blows up a whole lot here and correspondingly the fifth district has all this whole section that sneaks up here and then gets another little bit of space up here. So FixFillyDistricts was actually an open source project where people could work with the data, the census data, the map data, the war data and submit their own ideas for building a new set of city council districts for Philadelphia and it was an amazing example of civic engagement and we actually got pretty good results. This is what the city council actually approved. It was one of the submitted maps. You can see that the seventh district and the fifth district looked like fairly respectable districts that are not drawn to satisfy somebody's political will. So that's about all I had to say but I'd be happy to answer any additional questions about how we've used Cicero or how you might use Cicero or Abby can probably answer a lot of questions as well. Sure. Thank you so much, Thomas. That was really, really informative. I was actually wondering when you were first starting out, did your constituents realize that they were getting more accurate data when you were trying to refer them to specific legislative districts or representatives? Did you have any reaction? I think that people were... I would say we probably didn't highlight that as much as we might have. I think that we had this very specific goal in mind of wanting to match people to their legislators and to some extent I think... I was actually surprised at how difficult the problem turned out to be. I'm like, hey, we've got all these services that match people to their legislative districts. Why can't we just extend that to local districts and it turns out that the problem was more difficult than I initially perceived. Xavier was the folks who solved it, particularly with their approach to geocoding. We specifically looked at the zip code problem and even though some of these other services improved their matching with zip plus four, zip plus four is a moving target. The postal service can move those plus four codes around at will. It's not intended to be a mapping tool. It's intended to be a postal delivery tool. Using the specific latitude and longitude based on somebody's address really is the way that you can get an accurate match for districts. We're glad that we're using the right data and directing people to the right legislator. Okay, great. I did have a question that came in a little bit ago and Thomas, you might be able to answer this or Abby, you might be able to. Jay asked, is there a limit to how many addresses I can submit through the API? For example, no more than a thousand addresses per day or is there no limit? I can definitely answer that. We don't put a hard limit on your usage of the API. As you can imagine with any web service, the more traffic we get, the more tasks the service is, we do have a very redundant system on the back end which means that's kind of tech speak for the fact that if we get overburdened in one service we can kind of switch over to another. If you have a huge, we do say for organizations that know they're going to be doing maybe millions of records in a very short timeframe, we do ask that you give us a little bit of a heads up so we can potentially ramp up additional resources to handle that, but no, there is, we don't put any kind of hard and fast limit on you as far as how many a day you can do. Okay, great, thank you. And just for everybody's knowledge, I'm going to go ahead and put into the chat the bit lead to the Cicero API legislative matching on TechSoup stock so people can access that there. So if anybody has any questions, again, please type them into the chat pane because we will be around for a couple more minutes answering questions. One thing that's really struck me hearing Thomas' story and, you know, Abby hearing you talk about Azavia's work is that Azavia seems pretty open to working with nonprofits. If a nonprofit had a specific request, or I guess this could go to Thomas too, how exactly did you go about approaching Azavia? Sure, so I mean, Azavia has definitely found a niche in Philadelphia and, you know, they're a consultant and software provider to a number of nonprofits. So, you know, they're not going to work for free, but, you know, they're donating these credits, you know, 5,000 per organization through TechSoup stock, but I'm sure that Abby would be happy to entertain additional conversations about ways that Azavia, either through on projects that either involve the CISRO API or other geospatial projects that might help your organization. Her colleagues at Azavia have been incredibly generous. Robert, the founder, has come and spoken at our local Philly Net Squared, which is an affiliated project of TechSoup Group, a couple of times and attended others, and her colleague Jeremy has been there and I think Abby's been there herself a couple of times, so they're very engaged in what's going on both technologically and in the nonprofit sector in our region. And one thing I would like to add to that, we work with nonprofits often to, one thing we do to kind of be able to work with nonprofits on very interesting projects is kind of what drives us as an organization is to get these projects using data that people may have on hand and have a really great concept for something that they want to do with their address-based or geographic data that they have. So we have worked with quite a few people to write grants for funding for these projects. We have a grant writer on staff and we will absolutely work with people to write the technical portion of those kinds of grants as well. So yes, we are driven by the content of the project and we very much anticipate and look forward to working with nonprofits on interesting projects around their data. Okay, great. Thank you, Abby. One thing that I was just wondering because I come from a library background and I was just curious as to whether or not you, specifically because Abby had heard of any libraries who had used this API because I'm just thinking of with a lot of the funding being cut for libraries that this might be a powerful source for them as well. Sure. This actually just came up this week. We don't currently have any clients that are libraries. So we have a number of libraries who I've talked to who we're working with on other projects who will direct people to the free CitroLive tool that is basically just a sample that shows you how to look up an address and get information back. It is a good resource for individuals to look up issues. We would love to also again entertain any ideas that libraries have around these resources. The spatial data lookup, so the actual map information that we gather by hand is not widely available in one place. So we spend a lot of time looking for that information. University libraries have a lot of information based on a lot of geographic information often for their geographic region but not necessarily for the rest of the U.S. And the great thing about working on this has been using library resources, working with libraries to get the universities as well to get this information, the spatial information for the CitroLive API. Great. Thank you so much. And I haven't seen any additional questions come in but if anybody does think of any questions after the fact you can contact both Abby and Thomas and their contact information is on your screen right now and I will also be sending it out in the follow-up message. So again, thank you so much Abby and Thomas for providing this presentation today. It's been really, really great. And just a little bit to wrap it up, a little bit about TechSoup. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization like many of you and we do attempt to provide technology and technology resources to nonprofits and libraries throughout the world. And our mission statement, TechSoup is part of TechSoup Global which is working towards the day when every nonprofit, library, and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources they need to operate at their full potential. And of course, part of our mission in providing technology and technology resources you can go to TechSoup.org to find out more information on these technology resources by going to the Learning Center or the blog or you can go to find products over here. And don't forget that we do have TechSoup newsletters by the Cup and New Product Alert. And if you want to go ahead and sign up for those you can go to TechSoup.org and enter your email address in there. And I do want to go ahead and stay in early talk which is our webinar sponsor for this event. So thank you very much for all of your wonderful support. And just as one final reminder, we will be having a webinar next week, December 8th at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on training in a visible audience delivering effective webinars. And the presenters will be myself, which is Kyla Hunt and Stephanie Girding who is a professional librarian and trainer. So again, thank you Abby, thank you Thomas, and thank you John for being on the chat. And thank you everybody for attending today. I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you. Please stand by.