Knowledge is power, and in the realm of economic development and industrial recruitment, the more detailed and targeted that knowledge, the more powerful it is.
That’s why the South Carolina I-77 Alliance is excited to now offer the ability to analyze workforce, demographic, and socio-economic data in unprecedented detail directly through our website and those of our partner economic development agencies in York, Chester, Lancaster, Fairfield and Richland counties.
This free online resource, Recruit v4.5 from GIS WebTech, provides this data, coupled with available property listings, built on a platform powered by the latest advancements in online mapping technology. Recruit v4.5 will instantly position each economic development office as the most technologically advanced repository of local economic data in their community. While all six websites have always featured local data, the Recruit v4.5 platform takes it to a whole new level.
Figure 1: Heat Map of Millennial Population in Richland County, SC Area
For instance, before Recruit v4.5, if an entrepreneur, developer, or business executive required demographic data for local market intelligence, they might have found a static PDF report with fixed data variables and geography. Helpful, but not insightful. Recruit v4.5 turns knowledge into power when that same user could answer the question: “how many Millennials live within a 20-minute drive, during rush hour, from a prospective location?”
Figure 2: Infographics highlighting the young, growing and educated workforce in Richland County, SC
This is the value of Recruit v4.5 – supplementing legacy technologies, such as the GPS we’re so used to for navigation, with sophisticated, yet user-friendly, data customizations drawing on the power of Esri Demographics, a regularly updated data set aggregating more than 15,000 demographic and socioeconomic variables geographically.
In other words, no more settling for approximations.
This all-new level of knowledge management in each of the counties’ platforms, and our own, fundamentally improves our region’s efficiency in attracting new industrial and corporate facilities. Each platform highlights data and assets both inside and outside the respective community, while a common interface, shared technology, and data fidelity across all six platforms ensures a seamless user experience. In fact, this technology is the industry standard used by professionals in the practices of site selection and corporate real estate.
Local data has always been available; the challenge has been how to access it, customize it, and update it. Recruit v4.5 disrupts this status quo, empowering the region’s stakeholders to develop innovative data applications across fields such as: the start-up entrepreneurial eco-system, transportation and land-use planning, workforce development, higher education, and real estate developers.
Figure 3: Drive Time Boundaries, Inbound on Mondays at 8:00 AM
Collaboration is the foundation of this initiative. Realizing the platform’s value, all five counties worked together for comprehensive coverage. Real estate listings feed into our systems by LocateSC in partnership with South Carolina’s Department of Commerce. Workforce and wage data is sourced from the Alliance’s economic-data vendor, Chmura Economics, with these deployments representing the first public-facing integration of their data, enhanced with Recruit’s functionality. And the collaboration between GIS WebTech and Esri is why all users of Recruit v4.5 get free access to reports and tools that cost thousands of dollars a year to generate and maintain.
Collaboration brought this resource to our region and we’re confident that the local economies of each of our five counties from Columbia to Charlotte will be able to flourish when stakeholders collaborate to access this new level of data-driven power.
Please explore the platforms and data and share this new resource with your colleagues and peers. Please contact the South Carolina I-77 Alliance to learn more about the technology or for a demonstration.
