Data Viz Inspo

Looking for ways to make your data more engaging? Take inspiration from these data tips on steal-worthy visualizations. Click on the images below to see the whole visualization and get suggestions on what to steal from it.

To see past data tips, including those about other chart types, scroll down or click HERE.

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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.

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Behold the Heated Bar Chart

I’ve come across this useful chart a number of times and have yet to find a name for it. So I’m giving it one: the heated bar chart. If a bar chart and a heat map had a baby, it might look like this and be even more powerful than its useful parents. This heated bar chart shows months along the horizontal axis and days of the week along the vertical axis. Darker and longer bars on the two bar charts and darker cells on the heat map show when there has been the highest participation in hours. This allows us to examine patterns in participation. We can see, for example, that the relatively high participation in May is being driven by participation on Mondays during that month but that Monday was not a particularly high participation day during other months. We can also see that, overall, participation was lower during the fall months, regardless of day of the week.

This powerful combo chart can be used with many different types of data fields. For example, you might want to create one showing the number of participants from different gender identity and age groups to see if certain gender groups within certain age brackets are not well represented among your participants.

I made this chart with Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau. But this type of chart can be created with any number of applications. For those of you with at least a little Tableau know-how, check out the steps I took in the comic strip below.

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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.

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Why You Should Know About Calendar Heat Maps

Want to see patterns in participation, fundraising, volunteering, or social media measures across an entire year? A calendar heat map might do the trick.

This is a new addition to a series of tips on different chart types. In each tip, l give you need-to-know information in a format akin to the “Drug Facts” on the back of medication boxes: active ingredients (what the chart is), uses (when to use it), and warnings (what to look out for when creating the chart). The idea is to fill up your toolbox with a variety of tools for making sense of data. And the calendar heat map is a simple tool you can put to good use!

Active Ingredients (What is a calendar heat map?)

As in the example above, a calendar heat map shows a measure across days on a calendar. The measure might be the number of participants, dollars raised, volunteers recruited, social media engagement, etc.

Uses

Calendar heat maps provide a great way to see patterns in a measure over time, particularly if month and day of the week are important factors. For example, such a chart can help you detect whether participation is lagging on Mondays during summer months. In the example above, you can scroll over dates for more information and use the program filter to see participation for the selected program. Here are instructions for creating an interactive calendar heat map with Tableau and in Excel.

Warnings

Depending on your needs, other charts that show change over time may be more useful to you. For example, if you need to more clearly see the amount of change over time, a line graph might serve you better. For other chart types that show change over time, see below.

Fun Fact

Here’s a fun calendar heat map showing more/less common birth dates.

Source: Amitabh Chandra on Tableau Public

To see past data tips, including those about other chart types, scroll down or click HERE.

Source: Visual Vocabulary by Andy Kriebel on Tableau Public

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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.

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When to (and NOT to) Use a Map

Reposted from December 2019

Maps can be a powerful way to show your data. But not always. Maps work best when . . .

1) Your audience already knows the geography.

Most Americans have a basic understanding of the size, demographics, land use, weather, and history of different regions of the U.S. It’s that foundational knowledge that makes maps like the following so effective. We think: wow, cows would take up all of the midwest if we put them all together, and urban housing would require only a portion of New England. Or, if only white men voted, just a few states in New England and the Northwest would go Democratic.

Source: Bloomberg

Source: Brilliant Maps

But when we are not familiar with the geography, maps are much less illuminating. For example, if you don’t know Ireland well, then this map does not shed much more light on the matter than the simple bar chart in the upper left hand corner. It tells us which clans are most prevalent, which is all the map also shows us unless we know more about the different regions.

Source: Brilliant Maps

2. You are showing the significance of proximity or distance.

Even if your audience is not familiar with the geography (and sometimes especially when they are not familiar with it), maps can be an effective way to show proximity or distance. This map of the Eastern Congo shows us how close armed groups (in green) are to internally displaced people (in purple). Just naming the cities or regions where these two groups are would not be effective for audience unfamiliar with the geography.

Source: Brilliant Maps

For more information on when to use a choropleth map (in which regions are filled with a color, shades or patterns to represent a value), check out this great article from Datawrapper.

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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.

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How To Improve Your Organization’s Time Line

Reposted from March 2022

Here’s a simple data viz idea. Next time you make a time line showing your organization’s milestones, size those milestone markers (usually circles) according to some key measure. Voila! You are not only showing what happened but also your progress along the way.

The data for such a viz is super simple. Something like this:

I connected the data shown above to Tableau Public (the free version of Tableau) to create the time line below. Vertical time lines not only suggest an upward progression but also work better on phone screens.

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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.

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Why You Should Know About Cycle Plots

If you are looking to explore patterns in participation or giving, a cycle plot can get you there.

This is a new addition to a series of tips on different chart types. In each tip, l give you need-to-know information in a format akin to the “Drug Facts” on the back of medication boxes: active ingredients (what the chart is), uses (when to use it), and warnings (what to look out for when creating the chart). The idea is to fill up your toolbox with a variety of tools for making sense of data. To learn about other chart types, check out this index of data tips.

Active Ingredients (What is a cycle plot?)

A cycle plot shows how a trend or cycle changes over time. We can use them to see seasonal patterns. Typically, a cycle plot shows a measure on the Y-axis and then shows a time period (such as months or seasons) along the X-axis. For each time period, there is a trend line across a number of years. In the example below, we see that, on average (black lines show averages across years), there were the most travelers from Greece in August between 2001 and 2011, but we can also see that the number of travelers varied greatly from year to year. Use the filter to see trends for travelers from other countries.

Source: Travellers by Month Cycle Plot by Tai Shi Ling on Tableau Public

Uses

Cycle plots can help identify periods of time when the best or worst results are recorded. For example, you want to see trends in participation in your summer programs or patterns in year-end giving over the years. Cycle plots can be created in a number of data viz applications including Excel and Tableau.

Warnings

The range of years shown in each trendline can be shown on the X-axis or in the subtitle to the the chart, but the range should be clear and consistent across trendlines.

Fun Fact

William S. Cleveland and Irma J. Terpenning introduced the cycle plot in Graphical Methods for Seasonal Adjustment (1982) In their example below, we see that number of telephone installations are highest in late summer/early fall.

Source: William S. Cleveland & Irma J. Terpenning’s Graphical Methods for Seasonal Adjustment (1982)

To see past data tips, including those about other chart types, scroll down or click HERE.

Title Image Source: Seasonality with Cycle Plots by Vladimir Trkulja on Tableau Public

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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.

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Why You Should Know About Beeswarm Charts

If you are looking to compare individuals, programs, locations, events, etc. on one or more measures, a beeswarm chart could be just the ticket.

This is a new addition to a series of tips on different chart types. In each tip, l give you need-to-know information in a format akin to the “Drug Facts” on the back of medication boxes: active ingredients (what the chart is), uses (when to use it), and warnings (what to look out for when creating the chart). The idea is to fill up your toolbox with a variety of tools for making sense of data. To learn about other chart types, check out this index of data tips.

Active Ingredients (What is a beeswarm chart?)

A beeswarm chart (or swarmplot) is a type of data visualization that displays individual data points so that they don't completely overlap, resulting in a "swarming" effect. The beeswarm chart is related to strip plots and jittered strip plots, both of which are scatter plots with a measure on the vertical axis and a category on the horizontal axis. Strip plots become less useful when tightly packed data points start to overlap too much, obscuring patterns in the data. The jitter plot partly solves the problem but not as well as the beeswarm chart.

Uses

Beeswarm charts are useful to highlight individual categories or entities while still showing a distribution as a whole. In the example above, you can see that family events and smaller events were the most highly rated, while health events and larger events generally got lower ratings and that the distribution of average ratings was similar for introduction, beginner, intermediate, and advanced level events.

This type of chart is not native to most data viz applications but happily there is a free online tool called AdvViz that allows you to upload a CSV file to create a basic beeswarm chart and then download it as a Tableau file. From there, you can open it in Tableau Desktop and make adjustments to the formatting. That’s how I created the beeswarm chart above. You can also create this type of chart in Flourish and RAWGraphs.

Warnings

In the example above, I used color to distinguish different event types and circle size to show the number of participants in each event. When using color coding, make sure the colors contrast enough so that viewers can easily discern one category from another. Also, reducing the opacity of the color allows viewers to see overlapping circles. When using size to show a measure, make sure that the range of the measure is wide enough that the viewer can easily discern small from large. Small differences in size can be hard to detect.

Fun Fact

A beeswarm chart is a great way to show stressors on bee colonies! See chart below.

Source: Data Literacy

To see past data tips, including those about other chart types, scroll down or click HERE.

Sources: The Data Visualisation Catalogue

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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.

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What Averages Obscure

Reposted from January 2018

Nonprofits (and everyone else) are addicted to averages. We like to talk about how participants do on average. We might describe how many visitors we have in an average week. But how much are we missing when we focus solely on averages? Short answer: it depends, but it could be a lot. If I only showed you the average sized person in the picture above, would you appreciate the full range of sizes?

Image: Sketchplanations

To figure out what and how much we are missing, we need to calculate—or better yet show—how spread out our data points are. Understanding the spread gives us an idea of how well the average represents the data. When the spread of values in the data set is large, the average obscures the real picture more than when the spread is small.

Spread measures include range, quartiles, absolute deviation, variance and standard deviation. For more on these measures, check this out. 

A great way to quickly grasp the spread of your data is to make a box plot. A box plot (aka. box and whisker diagram) shows the distribution of data including the minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile, and maximum. The box plots below show the affordability of neighborhoods in five cities. Each red circle represents a zip code area. The gray boxes show where 50 percent of the zip code areas fall on the affordability scale. And the median (the middle point in a dataset) is where the dark gray meets the light gray. You can see that, in general (i.e according to the median), New York is more affordable than Los Angeles. However, New York has some zip code areas that are much less affordable than the median seems to suggest.

So when looking at your data, don’t just look at averages, also consider the spread.

Image created by Moxilla for Noun Project.

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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.

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And Here's A Bonus: A Bar Chart Catalogue

I thought I had wrapped up my miniseries on bar charts when I came across this excellent bar chart catalogue by Rosa Mariana de Leon-E. It includes 27 variations on the bar chart with links to instructions for creating them with Tableau. Enjoy!

Source: Rosa Mariana de Leon-E on Tableau Public

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #8: Double Duty Stacked Bars

This week I offer up my last bar chart hack. I came across this hack just recently in Philip Bump’s excellent Washington Post newsletter, How To Read This Chart. In the newsletter, he shares a chart from his book: The Aftermath: The Last Days of The Baby Boom and The Future of Power in America. The chart, shown below, is a sort of double-duty stacked bar chart. It not only makes use of the length of the bar segments to convey meaning, it also makes use of the width of the bars.

Here’s how Bump describes the chart: “The width of each column reflects the total percentage of the population for that generational group. The colored sections are the percentage that is each racial group. Black, Asian and Hispanic Americans of every age vote more heavily Democratic than Republican. It’s not just White young people who are more Democratic (though, among women, that is the case.) It’s that young people are less likely to be White and also more likely to vote against Republicans. The thesis of my book is that the baby boom (which backed Donald Trump by 3 points in 2020) is seeing its political and economic power fade, contributing to a number of the tensions we see in the moment. Between 2016 and 2020, the percentage of the presidential electorate that was baby-boom-aged or older went from 52 to 44 percent; the percent that was millennial or Gen Z went from 23 to 30 percent.”

Had Bump shown the percent of the population in different racial groups in one chart and the percent of the population in different generations in another chart, he would have provided fewer insights.

I encourage you to explore your data with this type of chart, showing the percent of your participants, donors, locations, etc. according to two different dimensions such as age group and zip code or giving level and giving history (recurring, one-time, major gift). It might yield important insights and help you to communicate them to others.

Source: The Aftermath by Philip Bump

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #7: The Lollipop Chart

Reposted from February 2019

The lollipop chart provides a short and sweet addition to the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.”

A lollipop chart is nothing more than thin bars with circles on top. So why go to the trouble? Well, if you have a lot of bars of similar length, you should not go to the trouble. The circles will just make comparing the lengths of the bars more difficult.

But the lollipop chart can be helpful when you have a bunch of bars of varying lengths, and you want to set them apart in a visually interesting way. Also, you can use those circles as labels, as in the example above.

Check out these easy instructions for making lollipop charts in Tableau and Excel.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

Icons created by Ben Davis, Dinosoft Labs, and andrewcaliber from Noun Project.

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #6: The Funnel Chart

Reposted from February 2019

Today we arrive at Episode 6 of the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” As we have discussed, bar charts are user-friendly and familiar, but familiarity can breed contempt. So this week we consider yet another variation of the bar chart called the funnel chart.

The funnel chart is used to visualize a process and how the amount of something decreases as it progresses from one phase to another. You might think of it as a pipeline.

The example below shows the decreasing number of participants at each stage of a food service training program. We can see that few of those who attend orientation make it all the way to a job. And we can see where there is the most/least drop off. This funnel is also interactive. You can see the funnels for particularly subgroups by changing the filter at the top.

It looks cool and makes intuitive sense, but a funnel chart is just a bar chart on its side with a mirror image. Check out these easy instructions for making funnel charts in Tableau and Excel.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #5: A Little Fine-Tuning Can Transform A Chart

Welcome back to the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” This week we look at some graphical fine-tuning that can transform a traditional bar chart into something that’s more engaging and more informative.

First I’ll show. Then I’ll tell.

Take a look at Chart A below. Then take a look at Chart B.

Chart A

Chart B

Both are bar charts showing the same data. But B wins, hands down. Why?

Chart A truncates the Y-axis making the difference between large and small counties look bigger than it actually is. Chart B, by contrast, fills in the whole bar and darkens the portion not attending school or employed, thus giving us a sense of the size of both groups (those who are in and out of school and work) in large and small counties.

Chart B points us to the main takeaway with the title and annotations.

Chart B doesn’t have unnecessary and distracting visual elements such as gridlines and axes labels.

Chart B provides images to further emphasize the contrast between large and small counties.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #4: Radial Charts

Reposted from February 2019

Welcome to Episode 3 of “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” This time we consider two bar chart subspecies that recast the regular bar chart in circular form. They may be eye-catching but be careful how you use them.

Radial Column Chart: (aka Circular Column Graph or Star Graph). As you can see in the example above, the bars on this chart are plotted on a grid of concentric circles, each representing a value on a scale. Usually, the inner circles represent lower values and values increase as you move outward. Sometimes each bar is further divided using color to show subgroups within each category. Because we are better at assessing length along a common scale, this type of chart isn’t ideal if you want viewers to accurately compare the lengths of each bar. However, these charts are great at showing cyclical patterns. Florence Nightingale used this type of chart (which she called a “polar area chart”) to show a cyclical pattern in the number and causes of death in the Crimean War.

View fullsize

This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.

Radial Bar Chart (aka Circular Bar Chart) is simply a bar chart in which the bars curve around a circle, like runners on a circular track. As you may recall, races on circular or oval running tracks include staggered starting lines so that runners on the outer (longer) tracks run the same distance as those on the inner (shorter) tracks. But the bars on a radial chart have the same starting line making it difficult to compare lengths. So skip the radial bar chart. Not worth the effort.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #3: The Combo Chart

Reposted from January 2019

Welcome to another episode in the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” As we have discussed, bar charts are user-friendly and familiar, but like all things familiar, they can be boring and easy-to-ignore. This week we consider—in about 30 seconds— how to combine a bar chart with another type of chart to wake us up and engage us.

Consider the two charts below. Both show the same data: fundraising goals vs. actual funds raised. The one on top uses bars for both categories. The bottom one uses bars for the goals and lines for actual amounts.

Which works better? I vote for the bottom one. It makes comparing values between two different categories easier because it uses not only different colors to distinguish them but different “encodings” (bars and lines).  The bottom chart gives us a clear view of when we are exceeding or falling short of our goals in any given month.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #2: The Icon Bar Chart

Reposted from January 2019

Welcome to Episode 2 of “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” This mini-series shows you how to take something that works well and that folks understand and move it in a more creative and engaging direction. This time, you meet a close cousin of the bar chart, but this cousin is more interesting than its relative. It has icons.

This is what you should NOT do with icons: make them into bars. Here’s why: bar charts are powerful (if boring) because we can easily compare their lengths. When icons or images are used in place of bars, such comparisons are more difficult to make. See the first example below showing how many clients live in different types of homes. It’s quite a challenge to determine how many more clients live in suburban homes vs. high rises. That’s because the height of the icons are difficult to assess.

The second example makes it a little easier. But I’d argue that in both examples 1 and 2, the icons make the viewer’s job (comparing lengths) unnecessarily difficult.

The third example, introduces bars back into the bar chart and thus requires minimal viewer effort.

And the fourth further lightens the load by removing the Y-axis and directly labeling the bars and placing the bars closer together.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

Image credits: House by ANTON icon from the Noun Project, company by Angriawan Ditya Zulkarnain from the Noun Project, Farm by Ferran Brown from the Noun Project

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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.

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Bar Chart Hack #1: The Divergent Stacked Bar Chart

Reposted from January 2019

Last week I promised to arm you with useful bar chart hacks. The idea is to take something that works well and that folks understand but move it in a more creative and interesting direction.

So this week I give to you: The Divergent Stacked Bar Chart.

Okay, so you know what a bar chart is. And you probably know what a stacked bar chart is, even if you don’t call it that. It uses color to show the subgroups that comprise each bar (or larger group) in the chart like this:

Regular Stacked Bar Chart

Now the cool, or divergent, part. It’s easier to show you than to describe it. So take a look:

Divergent Stacked Bar Chart

As you can see, the the divergent chart aligns each bar around a common midpoint. So it’s much easier to compare, for example, positive and negative values across categories.

Stephanie Evergreen provides directions on making a divergent stacked bar chart in Excel. And here are instructions on creating such a chart in Tableau. Other data viz softwares can make this chart too.

For a much deeper dive into the data viz world’s debate over when and if to use divergent stacked bar charts, check out this article by Daniel Zvinca.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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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.

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How To Hack A Bar Chart

Reposted from January 2019

Choosing a chart type is like making breakfast for your kids. Bar charts are Cheerios. You know they will eat it and it’s healthy. Now come the buts:

But #1:  Cheerios is boring and you wish they had a wider palate.

But #2: If you give them a quinoa breakfast bowl, it will go uneaten and you might as well have given them Cheerios.

When it comes to data visualization, Maarten Lambrechts says don't settle for Cheerios. He calls the problem “xenographobia” or the fear of weird charts. And he implores us to boost our viewers’ “graphicacy” by feeding them the equivalents of quinoa breakfast bowls in the chart world.

Here’s what I think. We should neither spook our children at breakfast time nor our funders, board members, and staff throughout the day. But we should try to slowly widen their palates. One way to do that is to take something they know and love and hack it a bit. Throw some nuts on the Cheerios. Use color in novel ways to enliven a bar chart.

Over the next several weeks, I will offer up different ways to hack a bar chart. Stay tuned!

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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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.

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Why You Should Know About Dot Matrix Charts

Reposted from September 2020

I’d like to introduce you to yet another chart type. The idea is to fill up your toolbox for making sense of data. This week, I give you the dot matrix chart.

Active Ingredients (What is a dot matrix chart?)

Dot matrix charts show us data units as dots (or squares). A single data unit could be a person, a group of people, a building, a program, or any other thing that you are counting. Each dot is colored to show which category or group the data unit falls into.

Uses

Dot matrix charts are simple yet mighty. They give a quick overview of the relative size of different categories and how the parts relate to the whole. I was reminded of the power of dot matrices recently when reading about the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard in an article on the National Public Radio (NPR) website. The dashboard shows data drawn from reports from K-12 schools on their confirmed and suspected coronavirus cases, along with the safety strategies they're using.

If you check out the dashboard, you see these charts showing the percent of schools reporting cases among students and staff. Take a look at the Y-axis. It ranges from 0% to 1%. This allows you to see small differences between the charts on the left (confirmed and suspected cases) and the charts on the right (only confirmed cases). But it has a big disadvantage. It doesn’t give you a visual sense of just how few students and staff have, or may have, been infected based on data that schools have. (Note: A big unknown is the number of asymptomatic/untested students or staff. Rates might be higher if more students and staff were tested.)

Source: COVID-19 School Response Dashboard

NPR recast this same data in a dot matrix chart (below) with each square representing 50 people.* And the first thing you comprehend is that the vast majority of staff and students at the reporting schools have not been infected (again according to information that schools have). Without much more effort, you see that there are more suspected than confirmed cases. No need to inspect the Y-axis or subtract percent of confirmed cases from the percent of confirmed and suspected cases.

Source: National Public Radio

Warnings

All those dots or squares require a good bit of page or screen real estate. Sure, one circle or square can represent more than one person or other data unit. But at some point, a bar chart might make more sense. Dot matrix charts work best when there are just a few categories and the aim is to communicate one or two simple messages.

Fun Fact

Dots or squares need not be displayed in rectangular form. This Policy Viz chart arrays the dots in a semi-circle to show the distribution of U.S. House members in different political parties. Gray dots represent empty seats. You can learn how to create a chart like this one using Excel HERE.

Source: PolicyViz

To see past data tips, including those about other chart types, click HERE.

*Note that the percentages displayed on the dashboard do not exactly match the numbers in the NPR dot matrix chart because the dashboard shows real-time data, and NPR used data from the dashboard on an earlier date than 9/24/20, the date when I took the image of the dashboard.

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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.

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How To Easily Visualize Where Your Funds Are Coming From and Going

Here’s a helpful, easy, and even fun way to show where your organization’s money is coming from and where it’s going. It’s called a Sankey diagram. Creating a Sankey diagram with data viz tools that don’t have an express Sankey option (like Tableau) can be daunting. However, there are various websites that allow you to create them quite easily, including Flourish, which is where I created the diagram below for free. Give it a go by scrolling over the chart and using the filter.

I started by selecting a Sankey diagram template. Then I simply replaced the data in the template with my own data, which included three columns: funding source, program, and value. Flourish provides various options to customize the look of the diagram (font, color, etc.) And it gives you an embed code so that you can share it on your website.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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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.

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