Press

Long Island Index Launches New Website

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EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE ON 12/13/10
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Deanna Morton, InfiniTech
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LI Index Launches New Website Where Visitors Can “Have it Their Way!”

Search, View & Share, Use the Data You Want, The Way You Want it, When You Want It

Garden City, NY (December13, 2010) – The Long Island Index announced the launch of its redesigned website www.longislandindex.org which was in development for more than a year-and-a-half. The website now offers a unique interactive experience that allows users to “Search”, “View & Share”, and “Use the Data” in a completely new format. Need to know the latest statistics on Long Island’s employment trends? Want to see what Long Islanders have to say about their downtowns? Looking for a map of enrollment change for elementary schools across all Long Island school districts? All of these questions, and more, can be answered by using the new Long Island Index database search feature on the home page. The innovative website allows users to share the data across a variety of platforms — by email, on Facebook or other social media sites. The data can be bookmarked for later use, saved in a personal portfolio, downloaded or can be used to create visually appealing reports using the templates provided.

According to Ravi Ramkeesoon, Technology Coordinator and Researcher at the Rauch Foundation, “We had two goals for the site – first, to make it more engaging by telling our story in new ways and second, to make it easier for people to find and use specific pieces of information from the wealth of data we have gathered over the years.”

According to Ann Golob, Director of the Long Island Index, “We wanted to create compelling ways to communicate the information visually. The flash on the homepage highlights key problems facing Long Island. In the multimedia section of the site, visitors will find video clips, interviews, population growth stories going back to 1800 presented as interactive rollover maps and charts that can be broken down by year, age groups and towns.” She added, “We created flyers on key topics that can be downloaded, used as is, or altered to be used for a community meeting, a presentation to a school board or a discussion with an elected official. Our goal was to give people multiple ways of connecting to the information intellectually and emotionally while at the same time making the data simple to understand and easy to find.”

Key components of the newly designed site include:

  • Search: The “Search” component of the website utilizes a new database which contains more than 1,500 charts, articles, definition of terms, survey responses and more than 4,000 maps of Long Island communities. The new interface makes it easy to search for specific facts, indicators and survey questions that have been published since the launch of the first Long Island Index report in 2004.
  • View & Share: The “View & Share” capability allows users to see and share all of the information resident in the database. This includes all of the reports, surveys, graphics, diagrams, maps and more.
  • Use the Data: The “Use the Data” section of the website enables the user to download the facts, figures, charts and graphs. A series of flyers can be downloaded, used as they are, or modified, to incorporate user-defined information. The flyers focus on specific topics such as the economy, housing, education, land preservation and taxes.

According to Mark Fasciano, Co-founder of Karma411, General Sentiment and FatWire Software, “The new Long Island Index website is a valuable resource for business people, entrepreneurs and citizens alike. Longislandindex.org is an outstanding advance for the Index, and is a wonderful example of how technology can make research data come alive. We are already starting to use it at Canrock Ventures to help build our portfolio companies.”

About the Rauch Foundation: The Long Island Index is funded by the Rauch Foundation, a family foundation headquartered in Garden City, New York. In addition to funding the Long Island Index for seven years the Rauch Foundation commissioned The Long Island Profile Report and a series of six polls on Long Island to determine how the region is faring compared to other suburbs in the NY Metro area. The polls, (1) “Long Islanders: Who Are We?” (2) “Caring for Long Island’s Children”, (3) “Room for Growth: Long Island’s Changing Economy”, (4) “Where Do We Grow From Here? Land Use on Long Island”, (5) “Regional Attitudes on Taxation and Governance”, and (6) Long Island Looks to the Future: Housing Alternatives and Downtown Development.” The Long Island Index 2004, Long Island Index 2005, Long Island Index 2006, Long Island Index 2007, Long Island Index 2008, Long Island Index 2009 and Long Island Index 2010 are all available for download at www.longislandindex.org. The Long Island Index interactive maps, an online resource with detailed demographic, residential, transportation and educational information, is also accessible from the Index’s website.