CASSOPOLIS — The Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) has recognized the Edward Lowe Foundation for excellence in economic development research.

The foundation was honored for YE+, a subscription platform on its YourEconomy.org website that provides researchers with advanced capabilities for tracking business activity and job growth.

The C2ER awards program recognizes the contribution of research activities to the success of local, regional, state or provincial economic development initiatives.

Projects could be submitted in five categories and were judged on their contributions to the economic development research field, innovativeness in approach, implementation or collaborative efforts, responsiveness to customer needs and benefits resulting from project implementation.

YE+ was a finalist in the category of “data collection/dissemination efforts, including Web-based systems.”

Gregg Cole, the foundation’s manager of information technology research, accepted the award at a ceremony on June 9 during C2ER’s annual conference in San Francisco, Calif.

“This award is especially meaningful because its criteria — particularly collaboration and innovation — mirrors our mission with YourEconomy,” says Cole. “To continually improve the Web site and develop new data tools, we talk with economic developers and researchers around the country to find out what data is most important to them and how they use it, which led to the creation of YE+.”

YE+ enables users to:

• Create and save customized data regions by state, metropolitan statistical area (MSA), county and ZIP code, making it easier to compare regions and time periods.

• Further refine regions by isolating activity of establishments within specific industries via two-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes.

• Download customized data from the YE+ website into a spreadsheet for further analysis.

• Purchase targeted company contact information from Dun and Bradstreet, which includes the company’s six-digit NAICS code.

“It’s all about simplicity,” Cole adds. “The NETS database, which we use to get time-series raw data for YourEconomy and YE+, gives researchers the largest amount of economic data possible, and we deliver it in a format that’s easy to access — and easy to understand.”