Volunteer Providing Support for National Cleanup Day ArcGIS Online Management

National CleanUp Day is global in scope and is one of several initiatives by Clean Trails to draw attention to litter solutions. Partnering with multiple organizations worldwide, Clean Trails is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and community of people dedicated to keeping the outdoors clean. National CleanUp Day operates seven websites (cleantrails.org, nationalcleanupday.org, worldcleanupday.us, plogging.org, trashtag.org, cleanupnews.org, and cleanups.org). 

National CleanUp Day requested a volunteer for two to three months to perform a needs assessment, make recommendations, and build out a centralized mapping system incorporating cleanups organized by all of their affiliated seven websites. Marinel Willemse was selected for the project. In addition to building web maps/apps, Marinel was asked to provide staff with documentation and training on how to maintain the centralized mapping system.

National CleanUp Day, in collaboration with Earth Day, provided Marinel with access to their existing ArcGIS Online Organizational account where current cleanup data are hosted. Marinel updated their existing framework for capturing and viewing cleanup events where the public can access a Survey123 form and Dashboard for registering a cleanup and viewing already registered cleanups.

Using Experience Builder, she also created dashboards that allow the administrators to review these events and approve/disapprove any events depending on the information and attachments provided to ensure that only valid cleanup events are accessible on the public map. Finally, a Survey123 form was created for reporting cleanup events once an event has passed for event organizers to provide feedback on the cleanup itself, amount of litter collected, photos and videos from the event, etc. These reported cleanups can then be viewed in an Attachment Viewer application.

This foundational work completed Phase I of the project which enabled the collaboration network of National CleanUp Day, Earth Day, and various other NPO’s to make use of the baseline surveys and maps created here and customize it for each organization that’s involved in these cleanup platforms.

National Cleanup Day in collaboration with Earth Day requested a phase II of their initial project. A few goals they had were: simple, sleek surveys for cleanup events that end users would be able to quickly fill out; a web mapping application showing cleanup events that was engaging and simple for the end user; a web mapping template that could be duplicated to show sponsored cleanup events; the ability to find and extract survey data quickly and easily; and the ability to easily monitor the survey data that was submitted with no lag in the data populating the map. Mary Camp, a GISCorps volunteer based in Florida, was selected for this project.

The needs of an organization frequently change and National Cleanup Day’s understanding of GIS had grown substantially after their initial project so they were ready for take two. They wanted simplicity in their surveys so Mary provided an event registration survey with bifurcating questions to limit the amount of questions the survey respondent had to fill out. This survey then fed into a web mapping application called Internal Global Events that showed the registered events in real time, and gave the end user the ability to filter by location or time.

Mary also created a second survey for past reported events. It tracks information such as the amount of trash collected, number of volunteers and photos from the events. The layer developed from this survey was also added to the Internal Global Events Application so that users could view both past and future events.

The final request was to recreate the dashboard that had been created in the prior phase for monitoring survey submissions. This was delivered by creating a survey, web map and dashboard. At the end of her time, Mary compiled useful trainings and completed a tech transfer so that the mission could continue in the future by non-GIS users.

The Global Cleanup Events web app helps the organization by connecting volunteers with cleanup events around the world, and helping organizations share upcoming events or share past cleanup event triumphs without the need for any data gathering and sharing by the organization. The sponsorship template helps them better entice sponsors by being able to provide web applications and surveys catered to their specific needs and wants. Lastly, the Event Review Dashboard helps eliminate any unwanted data in the Global Event Web app without requiring a knowledgeable GIS user.

Project completed.