The aim of today’s tip is to remind you of the importance of visualizing data. Without charts, maps, and graphs, we can get it all wrong. We base our understanding on a few stories in the media, on the experience of someone we know, or on what we hear most often about the topic rather than on what is actually happening. More on this in a moment. First, please take this short pop quiz and then scroll down.
“Stories about individual people are much more engaging – our minds like these stories – but they cannot be representative for how the world has changed,” writes Max Roser. “To achieve a representation of how the world has changed at large you have to tell many, many stories all at once. . . .“
Roser made the series of charts below to tell all of those stories in a way that we can understand. It shows the number of people out of 100 with various experiences over the course of 200 years. It’s worth checking out Roser’s whole article entitled “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it.”
I’ll leave you with one more quote from Roser: “The result of a media – and education system – that fails to present quantitative information on long-run developments is that the huge majority of people is very ignorant about global development and has little hope that progress against serious problems is even possible. Even the decline of global extreme poverty – by any standard one of the most important developments in our lifetime – is only known by a small fraction of the population of the UK (10%) or the US (5%). “
Source: Our World in Data
Let’s talk about YOUR data!
Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.
