The American Red Cross has a vast real estate footprint across the country. As these locations can change over time, it can be difficult to maintain up-to-date list of these locations and their contact information.
This scraping tool leverages the BeautifulSoup Python library to loop over a list of pages on the American Red Cross webpage that records each location per region and saves the output to a local CSV.
In addition to looping over the pages to grab addresses, this script optionally allows you to geocode them as well. When setting the configuration for geocoding to True, the script will also send the addresses it finds to the Google Maps API to get the latitude and longitude for each. See Usage > (Optional) Generate Google Maps API key below.
Create a new directory and activate a virtual environment with python3 -m venv venv. Activate the virtual environment with source venv/bin/activate.
With the virtual environment activated, run pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies.
Head to the Google Maps Developer portal and create a new project. Save the API key that is generated in a local file in the same directory as this project inside a file called .env. Make sure you label the value in the .env file as "GOOGLE_MAPS", put the key inside quotes, and don't include any spaces. For example: GOOGLE_MAPS='pp91YrT54SyDl1asdf84JJJ73sdf1M'
If you added a Google Maps API key, leave the geocoding value on line 9 set to True. Otherwise, change it to False.
Run the script with python3 amrc_branch_scraper.py. The script will take a few minutes to finish, and should generate a new CSV file inside your directory.