Asset mapping 101

Asset mapping — identifying a community’s official and unofficial existing resources — can be an important groundwork for engagement. I always approach asset mapping this way: Pull out a piece of paper, and draw a map of the neighborhood where you live.

Seriously. Do it now. It’s fun.

After drawing the cross streets, mark on the map where people hang out or meet. It could be a park, a school, a church, a bar or even a busy bus stop. Then mark all the key community organizations — places that provide services of some sort to the community. Yes, in some cases, community organizations also serve as places where people gather. Finally, think about the location of people in your neighborhood who are well-known to others. Maybe you have a block captain or someone who leads litter cleanups or that person who always comments on social media about things happening in your neighborhood. Once you are finished, stop and take a look at what you’ve drawn.

Congratulations! You have just made a community asset map. And asset mapping — using a bit more complexity, of course — can help you build relationships and better sources within underrepresented communities. This week, we’ll show you why asset mapping is important and how you can develop and sustain your asset maps using free tools.

Asset mapping for newsrooms

Asset mapping is not a new concept. It has been used by community organizers for years to keep track of the various institutions and people that help fulfil essential needs to a community. There are many different ways to produce such a map. You can go old school and use an actual map with pins on a wall. You can also use the latest software for a digital version. But in each case, asset maps have two fundamental elements. You need a list of the assets you wish to track, preferably with contact information and other details on why they are an asset. Then, you indicate where they are in relation to other key assets.

Communication, of course, is a crucial need. An essential component to building healthy communities is ensuring people can access truthful, reliable information focused on their daily needs. We saw the importance of timely, accurate information during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Combating misinformation ahead of the 2024 election is another major concern for maintaining the health of our communities. This is why some foundations, such as The Lenfest Institute in Philadelphia and Knight Foundation, have made major investments in producing collaborative solutions to keep residents informed.

In each case, an asset map can track who has the key information and where and how it is shared with the public. These maps can then be used in many ways to support community-centered journalism. Need to find better sources? Use the asset map. Need to build a resource guide? Use the asset map. Need to run a series focused on particular services within the city? Use the asset map. Need to have an understanding of what parts of the community you aren’t serving or reaching? Take a look at your asset map.

This is what Andrea Wenzel, an author and associate professor at Temple University, and I did with the Germantown Info Hub, the hyperlocal newsroom in Philadelphia we wrote about earlier in this series. With our map, we noticed we weren’t covering or engaging the east portion of the community, which is more working-class, as well as we could be. With this discovery, we made a concerted effort to do more coverage, hold more engagement events and add members from this area to our community advisory board.

Asset mapping in Pittsburgh

As part of API’s effort with Resolve Philly to improve the engagement practices of local newsrooms in Pittsburgh, we trained participants of our Inclusion Index project in asset mapping. Two of the participants have or plan to build asset mapping into their engagement infrastructures.

PublicSource, which has worked with API over the past two years, already uses asset mapping in its work. The newsroom has built two projects around its asset mapping and engagement efforts focused on traditionally underserved communities.

YaJagoff!, another Pittsburgh newsroom, developed a plan to use asset mapping to highlight areas where their coverage and engagement efforts are lacking. Following reviews of the maps, which will take place quarterly, they will develop plans for better engaging and covering these areas.

Ready to do asset mapping? Here are a few tips.

1. Develop categories to track

Before you begin, you must have a clear understanding of what you wish to track and create relevant categories. Nothing will derail your mapping efforts more quickly than sending people out who do not know what they are supposed to be looking for in terms of assets. Here are the categories we suggest to our Pittsburgh cohort:

• Influencers are those who help facilitate and distribute key information within a neighborhood or community. The heads of organizations and people with strong social media presence are often influencers, but there are far more people within communities who help facilitate conversations. A youth football coach, a long-time teacher, the resident who goes to every city meeting, but isn’t necessarily the head of anything. They are all influencers. When including influencers on your list, rethink your idea of expertise and expand your perspective beyond “digital influence.”Also keep this in mind: While your map can be public – it does provide for an essential resource to community members – anything for public consumption should not contain the information of private citizens. Keep influencer details for your newsroom’s eyes only.

• Community organizations are self-explanatory, but you should still research the type of organizations you include. Book clubs, block associations or even informal groups of people who meet to discuss issues can represent community organizations.

• Community gathering spaces are spots where people gather to have conversations and share information. The coffee shop I’m writing this piece in represents such a location. Libraries, places of worship, bars, barber shops and stores can also be gathering spaces. In my hometown, which has a heavy Spanish-speaking population, the local market serves as a gathering place for individuals who do not speak English.

• For digital gathering spaces, include all of the online spaces people may communicate. You may not be able to track these on a map, but you can still include them in a spreadsheet.

These are the categories we suggest, but you can develop your own. Just make sure you are consistent with definitions and explain the process to those involved in collecting the information.

2. Find a solid spreadsheet and mapping duo. We recommend Google.

• There are a lot of programs that will help you produce an asset map. PublicSource, for example, has used OpenStreetMap for its work, while the Info Hub used Storymaps. But if you are on a budget, try out Google My Maps, which allows you to create pins of different locations on any map, similar to the pins on Google Maps. Google My Maps also allows you to use a Google spreadsheet to help build your map. This video will show you how to manually enter addresses into your map, but a Google spreadsheet will save you a little time.

3. Start building your map with the sources you have on hand.

To get your map started, have your staff use assets they already know. This may be a source list or curated from old clips. You can also use basic search applications to help you find additional sources. This will help you begin to populate your maps. But you absolutely should not stop here.

4. Use direct forms of engagement to enhance your maps.

Using Google search will help you find some assets but won’t give you a deep perspective on the types of assets that are most essential to your community.

You need to do direct engagement work. You can start by simply walking around your target community. This is what PublicSource did for each of its community asset maps. Staff members would walk around each community, and the interactions and observations they made were used to fuel the creation of their asset map, which subsequently enhanced their efforts to engage and cover each community.

In addition to walks, try tabling at events, hosting community listening sessions or having conversations on the phone to gather perspectives from residents to help build your map.

5. Enlist the help of community organizers.

You read this in our last post, and you’ll read it again in the future. If you do not have a good grasp on what is happening within a community, you should use the help of people who do. Find people in the community who can help direct you to assets. Then ask them for the names of others who can help you on this journey.

6. Build a routine that requires staff to update maps regularly.

People move. Organizations and businesses close. If you plan on building asset mapping into your infrastructure, you should have people do routine engagement and regularly update their maps. Ideally, this should be done weekly, but whatever cadence you decide, make it a requirement of your staff. Optional is not good enough to sustain your map.

As I detailed in our last post, engagement work is difficult but essential. Multiple studies have   shown that reporters too often cover crime and other negative occurrences within communities, and do so without any effort to discuss how such issues impact other matters within the community. Far too often, newsrooms rely upon the same voices to represent communities because they claim they can’t find any other sources within certain underserved communities.

A strong asset map can help a newsroom overcome these issues with sourcing, and provide audiences with a much wider range of perspectives. It can also help build more relationships with communities, which is necessary for building trust in underserved areas. Because asset mapping requires collecting data, if done properly, it can serve as a long-term tool for newsrooms.