Fast offering routes in MLS

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
RossEvans
Senior Member
Posts: 1345
Joined: Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:52 pm
Location: Austin TX
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#11

Post by RossEvans »

Thanks to those who have replied. I am seeking private guidance and have kicked this one upstairs to the bishop. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide him with a definitive document on what church policy really is.

FYI, we have added another option to those on the table: One of our counselors very sensibly suggested buying shrink-wrapped, desktop software to accomplish this part of the task.

I am investigating DeLorme's Street Atlas USA 2009, which on paper looks like it might meet our need for producing the printouts of each fast-offering route. Under this option, we still would rely on the geocoding we already have performed on the ward roster, and import it into such a product.
RossEvans
Senior Member
Posts: 1345
Joined: Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:52 pm
Location: Austin TX
Contact:

#12

Post by RossEvans »

After much effort, my ward settled on a method of defining fast-offering routes and printing maps for the Aaronic Priesthood and their drivers. Of all the mapping projects I have worked on for our ward, this has been the most challenging. In fact, it is one of the most complex administrative tasks performed in the ward.

The process works like this:.
  1. Start with the whole ward extracted from MLS and geocoded to lat/lon locations. (Too long a story to tell here.)
  2. Determine the number of routes by the strength of the Aaronic Priesthood and adult drivers. (We have a huge ward but few deacons. At this time we have 8 routes.)
  3. Determine a subset of the ward to be visited on fast Sunday. (Dependant on local bishopric policy and conditions. Again, too long a story. We select about 50-60 families on the routes out of 570 in our ward.)
  4. Divide the subset into districts by geographic regions within the ward. I use GIS software to do this. Other methods are possible.
  5. Generate a .csv file of geocoded families, their coordinates, district numbers and name/address information..
  6. Run a script that creates a KML file for each district . To comply with Church guidelines, the files contain no name/address info, just coordinates. There is one record per base street address. Multiple apartment units at the same base address are associated with only one such record, because geocoding does not cover apartment units themselves.
  7. Log on to Google, go to Maps and choose the My Maps area.
  8. For each district, delete any pre-existing map. Create a new "Unlisted" map and upload the KML file. Save the map.
  9. For each such custom map, activate the "Link" dialog. Copy the custom URL generated by Google to the clipboard.
  10. Open a Districts .csv file -- which also was initialized by the script above -- in a spreadsheet and paste the URL into the appropriate cell. Save the spreadsheet as a tab-delimited .txt file.
  11. Run a second script, which reads the .csv and .txt files created above. This script generates a local HTML page for each district. Each such page includes several embedded links to the corresponding custom map on Google. The page displays a general locator map at the top with boilerplate instructions, followed by a thumbnail map for each street-address location. Next to each of these is a detail table for the family or families at that address, showing the private name/address info along with a report matrix for the deacon to fill out.
  12. Open each district HTML page locally in a browser and print it on a color printer. (Firefox works great; IE7 won't paginate correctly)
  13. Place the printout in a zipped plastic bag, along with the envelopes for the families. Hand these out on fast Sunday to the Aaronic Priesthood and their drivers.
  14. The fast-offering coordinator collates any updates from the canvassing, and feeds it back to the clerks.
  15. The next month, after a fresh extract from MLS. lather, rinse, repeat.
It seems complicated, and it is. But Steps 5-12 above take about an hour each month, much less that it used to take the fast-offering coordinator to perform similar updates manually.

The complexity was driven by several factors. It would have been very easy just to load similar KML files, complete with name/address data, into Google Earth locally. That is the interactive platform we use for most of our other ward mapping functions. But Google Earth makes lousy printouts. And we couldn't upload all that private data to the Google Maps web site without violating Church policy guidance. Also we were constrained by the legal terms and conditions imposed by Google. Strictly speaking, making thise printouts required special permission from Google, which we sought and obtained in a few days (another long story).

For purposes of illustration here, I have attached a prototype output report in PDF form. It is abbreviated and the name/address data is fictional. The final version uses different icons labeled "A" "B" "C" etc.
Attachments
Prototype District 1.pdf
(552.65 KiB) Downloaded 299 times
unjedai
New Member
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Jul 19, 2010 7:24 am
Location: USA

#13

Post by unjedai »

Came across this old forum post. Did you ever get something working? I was just contemplating a similar automated solution myself.
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