Since we privately rolled out Backyard Post a few weeks ago, I’ve received quite a few questions about our neighborhood boundary data. As in, where we got it. That’s yet another thing about which I meant to be clearer in my introductory post, but the answer is simple enough: I made it.

More precisely, I made it by hand, in ArcView, and it sucked. It took forever. About 20 months, so far. What’s more, I’m not done. I’ve drawn a couple thousand neighborhoods, but still have thousands more to go.

That sounds a little insane, right? As one person I corresponded with recently put it, most of us newsroom GIS users don’t even like editing a few ZIP code or congressional district maps obtained ready-made from some government agency. So what on earth could possibly justify spending so much time determining the boundaries of thousands of neighborhoods, then drawing the hundreds of thousands of individual points that make up those boundaries?

For one thing, and this isn’t an insignificant point, no one else has anything like it. More importantly, we knew all along that Backyard Post would be just one of many potential “customers” at The Palm Beach Post for such detailed geographic information. Put another way, we saw our investment in neighborhood boundary data paying off step by step. (You know, like on a staircase? Like the staircase pictured above, shot by Flickr user Niemster?) Key to that was that the mapping effort literally pay for itself on the very first step, which was not Backyard Post. No, the first step for our real-world neighborhood maps was the centerpiece “neighborhood of the week” feature in Florida Home, a weekly print feature section with a heavy focus on real estate. (Which itself was in many ways an evolutionary step up from the work I did all the way back in 2005 for our Mapping the Boom series. Which, in turn, I largely ripped off from work Matt Waite did back in 2004. Etc.)

Launched last March into the worst real estate market South Florida has seen in decades, Florida Home was nonetheless an immediate and reliable money-maker. (Did I mention it’s a print product?) The revenue it generates each week more than justifies the many months I’ve invested in building the neighborhood maps. The dollars we make on each subsequent step, such as Backyard Post, are profit-y delicious icing on our already handsomely ROI’ed neighborhood map data.

And just think of what could be on all those other steps! I’d think the GIS users in your company’s circulation and marketing departments would be interested in having access to real-word neighborhood geography, for example. (And if there are no GIS users in your company’s circulation and marketing departments, than your circulation and marketing departments are in trouble.)

Looks like this turned, yet again, into a bit of a ramble. The bottom line, then: Big investments like our neighborhood mapping effort shouldn’t be tied to one big roll of the dice. Make sure they can be used in many different ways, and that each of those many different ways has the potential to pay off individually, step by step. Nothing revolutionary there, just an important observation.