Data-Driven Advocacy: How to Turn Community Need into Decision-Ready Policy

As a nonprofit Executive Director or Policy Director, your mandate is clear: maximize mission impact while navigating limited political capital. In the private sector, the mantra "Location is King" drives billions in investment; in the nonprofit sector, where public infrastructure and service delivery are mission-critical, the same logic applies.

When your organization is at a crossroads, either advocating for upgraded public infrastructure or scaling programs into new geographies, you face two fundamental strategic questions:

1. How do we move beyond lived experience to decision-ready data? To win over skeptical authorities and representatives, you need proposals that are not just emotionally resonant but technically authoritative and data-driven.

2. How do we optimize resource allocation? When expanding services, you must ensure that limited funding and facilities are placed in the exact locations where they will yield the highest social return on investment.

   
   

In a physical world, geospatial suitability analysis is the foundation of a winning theory of change. It transforms a pressing social concern into a legitimate, actionable plan that officials cannot easily dismiss.

This was the strategic challenge for the Independent Drivers Guild in New York City. Through their No Place to Park campaign, IDG sought to address a glaring inequity: 80,000 for-hire drivers served by just 31 legal relief stands. Recognizing that "asking" was not enough, they partnered with North Arrow to build a geospatial roadmap—translating the daily struggles of thousands of workers into a vetted, professional proposal for urban reform.

Who Was Missing From the Map

The Independent Drivers Guild is a worker-led nonprofit that supports NYC’s for-hire vehicle drivers, including Uber and Lyft workers. These are essential workers, many of whom drive 12+ hour shifts with no safe place to stop. The city’s existing relief infrastructure, designed for yellow cabs, doesn’t account for the reality of gig work.

Drivers aren’t just underserved; they have been effectively invisible in the planning process.

IDG had a growing body of driver feedback, survey data, and street-level insights. What they didn’t have was a geospatial strategy. They needed to translate all that lived experience into a map that city officials could actually use.

Building a Smarter Siting Method: A Three-Pillar Framework

For any policy or program expansion to be successful, it must move from a broad need to a specific, vetted “where” (the geospatial imperative!). We approached this by developing a rigorous three-pillar methodology that balances municipal constraints with human reality. This framework ensures that every recommended location is not only legally viable but strategically optimized for maximum impact.

Step 1: Eligibility: Mapping the legal floor

The first step was to define the legal and practical boundaries of the city. We didn't want to waste political capital on proposals that were doomed from the start due to zoning or traffic regulations. We filtered NYC’s entire street network to identify segments that met the baseline for infrastructure placement:

• Traffic flow & safety: We excluded all Avenues and Highways to ensure driver safety and prevent further traffic congestion. 

• Land use sensitivity: We prioritized "good neighbor" policies by filtering out segments directly in front of residential buildings or sensitive government real estate.

• Operational compatibility: To avoid conflict with public transit, we excluded all active bus routes. We also made sure to exclude the few streets in the city that do not have parking lanes.

This narrowed the map from a chaotic city grid to a trustworthy list of legally viable segments where the City could realistically act tomorrow.

We mapped all residential and governmental lots to make sure not to recommend segments directly in front of them.

Step 2 : Desirability: The human-centered heatmap

Data is often cold, but advocacy is human. To ensure our proposal was rooted in the lived experience of the workforce, we deployed a geospatial-powered survey to nearly 30,000 IDG members. This allowed us to quantify "desirability" through two lenses:

• Problem Prioritization: We asked drivers to identify the primary friction points of the current system. Was the issue a lack of stands, chronic overcrowding, or the absence of nearby restrooms? This feedback allowed us to weight our final scoring based on what drivers actually value most.

• Aspiration Mapping: Drivers used digital pins to pinpoint their favorite stops for food and prayer, as well as where they would personally place a relief stand if they had the power.

By aggregating these thousands of data points, we moved beyond anecdotal evidence to create a "Hot Zone" heatmap, an authoritative visualization of where the community is already congregating and where the demand is highest.

Step 3 : Suitability: Optimizing for infrastructure and gaps

The final pillar was the technical "stress test." While eligibility tells us where we can go, and desirability tells us where we want to go, suitability tells us where we should go to maximize the return on every dollar spent.

• Coverage gap analysis: We mapped every existing relief stand and calculated their 5-minute travel-time catchments. This allowed us to intentionally recommend locations that fill existing service deserts rather than duplicating infrastructure.

• Infrastructure synergy: We layered in the locations of restrooms (both full public and privately owned public restrooms). A stand is better with adequate amenities around it. Our model prioritized segments that leverage these amenities.

• Real, quiet relief : Finally, we integrated traffic volume data (AADT) to prioritize quieter side streets, ensuring that new stands provide a genuine moment of relief away from high-stress environments.

  
  

Our goal was to create a map that doesn’t just show where relief stands are missing, but where they could realistically go. That meant combining hard logistics with human context.

Visualizing everything in one place for executive decision-making

We brought everything together into an interactive map-based dashboard, giving a high-level city perspective but also the option to filter by neighborhood. The result is an interface that does not only make the whole methodology and process transparent, but also provides a shortlist of precise, vetted locations that could actually serve drivers and pass city scrutiny.

One example was in Manhattan’s East Village, near an important Mosque and muslim community center with food, bathrooms, and rest space. This approach also honors the diversity and cultural imperatives of drivers, many of whom observe religious rituals that require them to make space for practice.

Finding 16 Recommended Segments for New Relief Stands

Leading by example, we used our own interactive platform to identify a shortlist of 16 street segments across Manhattan that stand out as top candidates for new relief stand placement. These segments were selected based on several key criteria:

• Legal and logistical eligibility for curb use, for example not in front of residential or government buildings and with sufficient parking lanes

• Low traffic volume, so adding stands would not significantly disrupt vehicle flow

• Proximity to public restrooms, addressing one of the top health and dignity concerns voiced by drivers

• Strong driver preference, based on survey data highlighting popular areas, particularly near faith centers that drivers frequent for daily prayer

  
  

This selection offers broad geographic coverage across Manhattan and puts drivers’ health, religious needs, and working conditions at the forefront, while still respecting the city’s existing land use priorities. It is a tight selection drawn from dozens of other promising sites identified by the platform. The list is not exhaustive, but it is meant to jumpstart the conversation and provide concrete candidates for initial implementation.

Empowering the Executive Mandate

The final deliverable of this work a decision-ready asset that equips the Independent Drivers Guild with the same technical sophistication as the government agencies they are seeking to influence. By shifting from a position of "asking for help" to "presenting the solution," IDG can secure a seat at the planning table

For Executive Directors and Policy Teams across the nonprofit sector, this project provides a scalable blueprint for high-stakes resource allocation. Whether you are expanding a mobile health clinic, siting a new community center, or advocating for transit reform, the ability to answer the question "Why here?" with mathematical precision is a game-changer for organizational legitimacy.

WATCH THE ENTIRE DEMO HERE ➝

A Replicable Model for Impact

The methodology we’ve outlined offers three core advantages for nonprofit leadership:

Scalability: The framework is not limited to a single neighborhood or issue. It can be applied across cities and states to ensure expansion is always driven by data, not guesswork.

Donor and board confidence: Presenting a vetted, geospatial strategy demonstrates a level of operational excellence that builds deep trust with major stakeholders.

Political resilience: As seen with the NYC pilot program, these maps serve as a "blueprint in reserve." They ensure that even when the political winds shift, your organization remains the most prepared and authoritative voice in the room.

Reach out to us to apply this work to your next campaign or program expansion.

⚠️Note on Current Campaign Status : As of January 2026, thanks to the successful passing into law of a pilot requiring the Department of Transportation to establish a program allowing for-hire vehicles to park in commercial parking meter areas, the following suitability analysis has not yet been formally presented to city officials. It remains a strategic "blueprint in reserve," ready for deployment to secure permanent infrastructure should the pilot program not be expanded.

Downloadable as a PDF: Appendix - Methodology

If you want to geek out on the detailed methodology for this work, you can read our step by step below.

Download here