CSR & Esri Ireland
Esri Ireland supports and promotes the wider use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the growth of the GIS community for the common good. Many customers use GIS to enable them to understand our world and positively affect the communities they live in, including the education and charity sectors.
As part of its Corporate and Social Responsibility Program, research was carried out into the work of charitable sector in Ireland to see how Esri Ireland could offer assistance. The findings showed that while there seems to be a massive support network available for voluntary, charities and care type organisations, much of this information is stored on web sites in text format.
Very few seem to display location type information on a map, whereby people can easily search by their address or region to see what care facilities are available in their area, what support networks they can avail of, what charitable events are taking place where, and where potential fundraising activities are happening.
The Wheel 
The Wheel is Ireland’s support and representative umbrella network for community, voluntary and charitable organisations. They help these organisations get things done, represent their shared interests to Government and other decision-makers and promote a better understanding by the public of the great work they do. As the Wheel were a “one-stop-shop” for and about the charity sector, Esri Ireland approached them with a view to delivering location-enabled services that support and encourage community & voluntary activities.
Better Together 
Each year the Wheel conduct a national campaign entitled“Better Together”. Better Together aims to build support for voluntary and charity organisatons clubs and associations across Ireland by encouraging the public to connect with and support these good causes, to help keep our communities strong.
What's the Better Together Campaign all about?
The campaign centres on a website www.bettertogether.ie where charities, clubs and associations showcase their work through short inspirational videos. The public is invited to become Charity Champions by voting for their favourite videos, nominating or voting for their Charity Heroes (a person who have done something extraordinary for a good cause), or by donating money as part of a Giving Challenge. Participating charities, clubs and associations will compete for a prize-fund of €20,000.
The Better Together Online Interactive Map
Last year their online map showed the location of 211 community and voluntary groups and links to their videos on www.bettertogether.ie. For 2011 The Wheel decided that they needed to make the map function much more interactive.
“Interactive maps are nothing new to us or our customers but recently we have identified at new ways to harness social media channels such as Twitter, Flickr & YouTube that may be a useful form of information to voluntary organisations” commented Andrew Rea, Business Sponsor & Head of Professional Services, Esri Ireland.
Esri Ireland collaborated with The Wheel to provide an innovative and location-enabled facility that integrates geographic information with social media providing a much richer online experience. With the new Interactive Map, additional data and features have been added. Using hashtags for instance #btg11 or #charityhero, visitors to the site can tweet at their specific geolocation. This provides real time insight into dynamic twitter conversations as they happen across the map and creates a great buzz around the video competition.
In addition users can indicate how the public can support a particular organisation (vote for their video, donate, volunteer), filter by criteria (for instance, only show organisations by category, say youth organisations), or locate the nominees for the Ireland’s Charity Hero Competition.
Better Together Launch
The Better Together Launch takes place on 4th October in Dublin with the competition running from October to 11 November. You can check out the Interactive Map for yourself at www.bettertogether.ie