Map CiviCRM contacts to UK geographical areas

*Image credit: “Gross Disposable Household Income (GDHI) across the UK mapped in 2020” by Tweedledumb2 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 / key removed from original.*

We are planning to build an extension for CiviCRM that puts all contacts into UK geographical areas based on their postcode. This will allow organisations to segment their contacts by local authority, ward, county, region etc. This makes it much easier to create reports on how many contacts you have in each area or to segment contacts by area for mailings.

This is hard to do out of the box in CiviCRM as postcode areas don’t map neatly onto political and local authority boundaries. However, there is a service called MapIt that gives you the political, local authority and health areas for a given postcode. To see this in action take a look at EX1 1DF for example. We plan to create an extension for CiviCRM that adds UK geographical areas to contact records using the MapIt API so that these areas will be easily accessible alongside your contact data within CiviCRM.

We intend to support the following use cases with this extension:

A membership organisation wants to report on how many members they have in each of the UK regions and local authority areas.
A campaigning organisation would like to contact all supporters in a particular constituency to ask them to email their MP on a certain topic.
A community organisation wishes to invite contacts that are residents of a specific ward to an event about their local area.
A coop has plans to advertise opportunities to get involved with their work to residents in specific London boroughs.

The above are examples of the sort of functionality that this extension will support but it should work for other similar use cases and other area types.

The MapIt API is free to use for up to 50 API calls per day. There are tiered charges for higher volume usage with discounts for UK charities and non-profits (free use for charities for up to 10,000 calls per month).

The functionality is limited to the UK initially. However, it could potentially be extended to other countries if there is a suitable API that provides similar data.

We are looking for organisations that would be interested in funding the development costs of this extension. Please get in touch if your organisation would find this useful. Send an email to William Mortada on williammortada@thirdsectordesign.org.