danilito19/direct-mail-maps

Visualize geographic distribution for direct mail

direct-mail-maps

Visualize geographic distribution for direct mail

This package bundles shapefiles for US ZIP codes and UK postal codes with a simple python script for generating maps of letter recipients. An example image is shown below:

1. Clone the package locally. The shapefiles folder is intially empty. You will need to retrieve the shapefiles with

    s3cmd get s3://avantminer/tmp/shapefiles direct-mail-maps/shapefiles/shp.tgz
   

followed by extraction:

    tar xfv shp.tgz

2. Install the basemap package from mpl_toolkits. Follow the instructions at http://matplotlib.org/basemap/users/installing.html.
3. Create a single-column CSV with the ZIP codes for the direct mail send to be processed. The most convenient way to do this is to use the cut command to strip the ZIP column from a return file. Save this file in the ZIPs directory.
4. Finally, run the script with python plotmap.py -l US -z inputfile.csv -o outputfile.png. You can also use the -m flag for color saturation.