Tech Forum

Hello,

Here in Calgary we have a huge city-wide food drive each September. I run a call centre that depends heavily on the meetinghouse locator functionality to know where to assign drivers to pick up missed bags of food. We have 5 people who sit around my kitchen table for about four hours and look up addresses to find out what stake and ward they are in.

Does anyone know if we'll hit some sort of usage limit? Even more amazing would be if there's an API we could use to do this. We wrote our own software to handle the call centre and it works really well, but looking up the ward and stake is still quite manual. It would ruin our effort if lds.org cut us off after too much use. Complicating it further, everyone except me is a non-member at the call centre so we'll have to share my maps.

If anyone has any insight, I'd love to hear it. Thanks. If you might know how I can contact someone who works in that area for the church, that would be great too.

KMZ boundry files can be downloaded from CDOL and imported into Google Earth

That's a great tip, thanks very much. I wasn't aware. I no longer have access to CDOL but I can find someone who does fairly easily.

I wonder if it would be feasible to create a Postal Code to Stake & Ward lookup table for the Calgary area, then query that table? It could be alot of up-front work, but the lookups would be really fast.

dustinaleksiuk wrote:Does anyone know if we'll hit some sort of usage limit?

I have not heard of one. You might wish to have a backup plan, in case the site is slow or down.

rontilby wrote:I wonder if it would be feasible to create a Postal Code to Stake & Ward lookup table for the Calgary area, then query that table? It could be alot of up-front work, but the lookups would be really fast.

I don't know what Canadian postal codes are like, but in the USA, they have have some very strange areas, which wouldn't necessarily map well to a chapel location. For example, there is a church building in my zip code, but I don't go to church there. There's another church building closer to me and some people in the zip code (which is not one contiguous area) may be in another stake. The postal codes are for convenience of the post office delivering mail. For this type of lookup system, it may be better to buy data from mapping companies and build systems based on that data.

You might be able to put an address in Google maps and have it show LDS churches and find the closest one to it. Or there might be other, helpful online services.

Is there some way you can have donors report which building they left food at?