Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 14)

“All creative work builds on what came before.” —Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist.

Today I offer up another steal-worthy viz that I came across in the Tableau Public Gallery. All nonprofits need to understand and show the demographics of their participants or the communities they serve. This dashboard of South Korea’s demographics uses some good strategies you can apply to your organization’s charts and maps. Keep scrolling to examine the dashboard and see my suggestions on what to steal from it.

Here’s what I suggest you steal from this viz:

  • Heat = Density. The map uses warmer colors to show higher population density and cooler colors to show lower density. This makes finding the big population centers easy.

  • Charts for key demographics. A quick review of the charts on the right gives you a clear understanding of demographic trends over time.

  • Chart title as color legend. Using the chart title to explain the color coding in the chart is a great way to save space on small charts.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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.

Data Viz Resources You Should Know: Visual Capitalist

Here’s a new addition to my highly-curated resources list: Visual Capitalist. I occasionally write a 60-second data tip describing a particular resource, including why I think it’s cool. And I link each of these tips to a resources list on my website.

What is it?

Visual Capitalist is an on-line publisher of data visualizations. Their aim is to make the world’s data more discoverable. As the name suggests, the visualizations primarily focus on markets, technology, energy, and the global economy but also on education, healthcare, and the environment using public sources of data including government entities (i.e. U.S. Census data, FRED, etc.), intergovernmental organizations (IMF, World Bank, etc.), or established thought leaders in their respective sectors (think tanks, non-profits, corporations).

Who’s it for?

Anyone who wants to understand or show information on markets, technology. energy, healthcare, education or the global economy. They allow much of their original visual content to be used by others. In many use cases, this can be done for free. (See more info on using their content.)

Who’s behind it?

Visual Capitalist is independently owned, with its founder, Jeff Desjardins, as a majority shareholder.

Why I think it’s cool

Their visualizations can be quite engaging with high production values. You can share them on social media for free. Sign up for a free subscription on any page of their website to get one in your email box each day.

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.

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.

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.

Data Viz Dangers: Hiding Variability

Data visualization has its pitfalls and landmines. Sometimes charts, graphs, and maps can have harmful consequences, intended or not.  So I’m offering up another tip in a series of 60-Second Data Tips that point out pitfalls and landmines to avoid. This time, it’s about hiding variability.

If we see a bar chart like the one below showing median income of Medicare beneficiaries by demographic group, we may make the following mistakes in interpreting it:

  • Assume that all or most of those in the higher income groups are earning more than all or most of those in lower income groups rather than assume that there may be more variation in income within groups than between groups.

  • Assume that the higher median income of a given group suggests that those in that group are more capable, smarter, skilled, etc. than those in lower median income groups rather than assume that those in the lower group faced challenges (e.g. racism, lack of education, etc.) that resulted in the lower median income. (This is called the fundamental attribution error.*)

  • Generalize our error-ridden conclusions about the people represented in the chart to all of those in certain racial, age, gender, or other demographic groups.

Eli Holder and Cindy Xiong conducted studies in which they showed participants charts that emphasized within group variability as well as those that did not like the chart shown above. And they found that participants were less likely to make the mistakes listed above when shown charts that emphasize within group variability such as the one below which shows that there is a lot of variability in scores within schools that one can’t appreciate by only looking at averages (represented by the black horizontal bars.)

Source: Jitter Plots in Tableau, by Ashish Singh

For a great ten-minute summary of the research, check out this video. What to do to avoid this pitfall? The video suggests that we find ways to represent variability within groups as shown below:

To see past data tips, click HERE.

*When visualizing data, we should consider how humans think including heuristics (i.e. mental shortcuts) and biases. Some of them have particular relevance to data visualization such as the fundamental attribution error, which is our tendency to relate behavior to a person’s character and personality rather than to the person’s context. So when someone cuts you off in traffic, if you write them off as a jerk rather than someone who is late for work or distracted, that’s the fundamental attribution error.

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.

Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 13)

“All creative work builds on what came before.” —Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist.

Today I offer up another steal-worthy interactive viz that I came across in the Tableau Public Gallery. Scroll down to see what you should steal from it.

Source: Nir Smilga on Tableau Public

Here’s what I suggest you steal from this viz:

  • Small Multiples. To highlight each country and to allow for easy comparisons across countries, Smilga created one small chart per country and placed them alongside each other, aka a “small multiples chart.”

  • Gray comparison trends. While Smilga highlights the trend for the featured country in each chart using color, the trends for other countries are also in each chart but in a light gray. This allows us to easily compare the trend for the featured country to that of others in general.

  • Color distinguishes trend types. Recent downward trends are highlighted in red, and recent upward trends are highlighted in blue.

  • Choose your view. Smilga allows the viewer to customize the view by selecting the number of columns, time period, and countries shown.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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.

How To Make Data Viz Accessible

Data visualization is the translation of data in the form of words and numbers to a visual format, using color, size, shape, and placement to convey trends and patterns in the data which can be much less apparent when looking at tables of numbers or words. Thus data viz communicates best to those with full visual capabilities. To make charts, graphs, and maps accessible to those with visual impairment, we must translate the meaning of a visualization back into words, which can be a challenge. Amy Cesal's article, Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization, can help us address that challenge.

Alt text is a brief description meant to provide the meaning and context of a visual item in a digital setting. And although Cesal notes that, in most cases, it’s impossible to write something short that conveys the whole meaning of a visualization, she maintains that an incomplete description is better than none at all. Here are Cesal’s simple guidelines for alt text for data viz:

Chart type: It’s helpful for people with partial sight to know the chart type. This information provides context for understanding the rest of the visual. Example: Line graph.

Type of data: What data is included in the chart? The x and y axis labels may help you figure this out. Example: number of clients served per day in the last year.

Reason for including the chart: Think about why you’re including this visual. What does it show that’s meaningful? There should be a point to every visual and you should tell people what to look for. Example: more clients are served during the winter months.

Cesal also suggests that you include a link to the raw data somewhere in the surrounding text.

For a deeper dive into this topic, checkout Image Description Guidelines from the Diagram Center.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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.

A Common Problem with Survey Data - And How to Avoid It

Sampling bias occurs when some members of the group you are trying to understand are less likely to be included in your data than others. Survey data is especially vulnerable to sampling bias. The data you collect is often not representative of the whole group that received the survey but rather the subgroup that was willing to complete the survey — as illlustrated in the “sketchplanation” above. So here are some quick tips to avoid this type of bias in your survey data:

  • Clearly define the group and related subgroups that you want to understand. Consider what might be necessary to collect sufficient data from all of the subgroups.

  • Follow up with those who don’t respond to the survey to understand why they didn’t respond. Did you ask the wrong questions or target the wrong audience? Apply these insights next time you are planning a survey.

  • Make your survey brief and easy to understand.

  • Finally, don’t overinterpret your survey date. Assess which types of respondents were the least likely to respond and interpret accordingly.

For a fuller explanation of types of sampling bias and strategies to avoid it, check out this SurveyMonkey article.

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.

How To Create Data Stories That Actually Engage People

Here’s a sneak preview of a workshop I’m doing on September 26th. I’m sharing the first few slides below. Click on the right to advance through them.

Presentation Preview by Amelia Kohm

To tell a story in a way that humans can understand and get behind, it helps to understand humans’ powers and challenges when it comes to consuming data. Then we can make better charts, maps, and graphs (aka data visualizations) and present them in a way that humans can absorb.

I hope you can join me on September 26th, 8:00 am - 9:00 am PT | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm ET. Click HERE to register.

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.

Add This To Make Your Charts Memorable

Copy of 60-SECOND DATA TIP_3.png

Reposted from October 2019

Look at the two images below.  Which catches your attention? Which do you think you are more likely to remember?

Edward Tufte and other data viz gurus have warned us against “chartjunk” which is anything that is not necessary to comprehend the information represented on a chart, map, or graph. The idea is to get rid of distractions and focus attention on the data.

But some research by Michelle Borkin and colleagues points in a different direction.  In an experiment, they showed participants charts with and without various elements that might be construed as chartjunk like photos and drawings. They found that such images not only did not hinder memory or understanding of visualizations, they appeared to serve as “visual hooks into memory.”  Such visual hooks are important because what we perceive is based, in part, on what we expect to perceive due past experiences.

The idea of not loading up a chart with a lot of junk competing for attention is still a good one. But some images, if they are closely related to the data and connect with what folks already know, can help viewers to focus on and absorb information.

For more on how to capture attention with data visualizations, check out this data tip.

Sources:

M. A. Borkin et al., "Beyond Memorability: Visualization Recognition and Recall," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 519-528, 31 Jan. 2016.

 P. Kok et al., “Associative Prediction of Visual Shape in the Hippocampus,” in Journal of Neuroscience 1 August 2018, 38 (31) 6888-6899.

 Photo by Nery Zarate on Unsplash

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.

When to (and NOT to) Use a Map

Copy of 60-SECOND DATA TIP_3.png

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: 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

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

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.

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.

Charts That Changed The World

This week’s tip is to check out this video from The Royal Society in which Adam Rutherford shares five data visualizations that have changed the world. Admittedly, this will take you more than 60 seconds to watch (it’s 6 minutes). But it’s worth it. Rutherford shares four classic charts. Two of them clarified a problem so well that they led to solutions. He also shares a chart that drives home the dangers of visualizing lies and thus making them look legitimate. If you’d like to learn more about these charts, I’ve included links below the video. Enjoy!

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.

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:

Screen Shot 2021-08-24 at 9.01.48 AM.png

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.

Dashboard 1 (3) (1).png

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.

How To Make Big Numbers Tangible

Reposted from March 2022

We’ve talked about the problem with big numbers before. Most recently, we considered the difficulty humans have digesting large numbers and how “perspectives” — simple sentences that relate a large number to something more familiar to us — can help us to understand, assess, and recall numbers. (For more on this, check out the data tip.)

I’m returning to the big number problem today and offering up some new tips for dealing with them. The inspiration for these tips came from the data-driven documentaries of Neil Halloran, specifically his first documentary called The Fallen of World War II. If you have a few more minutes to spare after reading this 60-second tip (and are not among the 13 million + who have viewed it already), I highly recommend that you check it out. It’s 18 minutes long, but the techniques listed below all appear in the first 7 minutes.

Halloran uses the following techniques to make large numbers understandable. And you don’t need to be a filmmaker to use them. You can apply them to simple data presentations on websites, reports, and PowerPoints.

  1. Use shapes or icons (rather than bars) to represent one or more people, programs, etc. Halloran uses a human figure shape to represent 1,000 people.

  2. Show an aggregate and then break it down by subgroups and time periods. Halloran shows aggregates, such as the total number of U.S. soldiers who died and then, using animation, redistributes the human figures to show how many soldiers died in the European and Pacific theaters and then how many died over time. The animation is cool but not necessary. You can do the same thing with a series of static images. See example below.

  3. Juxtapose photos and charts. To keep the discussion from becoming too abstract, Halloran reminds the audience what actual soldiers (rather than icons) look like by incorporating photos into his presentation. Again, animation is not necessary. Static photos can be placed alongside charts.

  4. Walk your audience through the data. To give the audience a sense of scale, the video progresses from smaller to larger numbers. Halloran first walks us through casualty stats for the U.S. and European countries. These numbers seem quite high so by the time Russian stats are shown, we are blown away.

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.

Data Viz Pitfalls and Landmines: Polarization

Charts, maps, and graphs can be great tools for illuminating trends and patterns in data. But data visualization has its pitfalls and landmines. Sometimes charts, graphs, and maps can have harmful consequences, intended or not. So I’m starting a series of 60-Second Data Tips that point out pitfalls and landmines to avoid. This time it’s about polarization.

When visualizing data, we should consider how humans think including heuristics (i.e. mental shortcuts) and biases. That’s a tall order given how many shortcuts and biases affect our thinking. See Diagram B below. Some of them have particular relevance to data visualization such as conformity bias, which is the tendency to change one's beliefs or behavior to fit in with others. Can data visualization exacerbate this bias?

You are likely familiar with charts showing U.S. attitudes toward public policies which highlight the gap between Democrats and Republicans. Researchers conducted experiments to explore whether such charts invoke viewers’ social-normative conformity bias, influencing them to match the divided opinions shown in the visualization. In three experiments described in Polarizing Political Polls: How Visualization Design Choices Can Shape Public Opinion and Increase Political Polarization, researchers either aggregated data as non-partisan "All US Adults," or partisan "Democrat" / "Republican." (See Diagram A) They found that the partisan charts tended to increase viewers’ polarization while the non-partisan charts did not, leading the researchers to conclude that visualizing partisan divisions can further divide us.

So when showing differences of opinions across various groups, we should take this finding into consideration. Is our ultimate aim to divide or unite?

Diagram A

Diagram B

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Cognitive_Bias_Codex_With_Definitions%2C_an_Extension_of_the_work_of_John_Manoogian_by_Brian_Morrissette.jpg

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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.

How To Visualize Cycles

Reposted from April 2022

Every organization experiences cyclical or seasonal patterns. Understanding how funding, participation, volunteering, and other factors change in predictable ways over time can help us to plan for the future. The problem is that we don’t always see these patterns. We get caught up in current issues and crises, and it’s hard to step back and see what’s coming next. Visualizing your data can reveal cyclical or seasonal patterns in helpful ways. This often involves aggregating data from multiple years by specific time periods such as season, quarter, or day of the week. Here are some examples.

Working with a statistician named William Farr in the 1800s, Florence Nightingale analyzed mortality rates during the Crimean War. She and Farr discovered that most of the soldiers who died in the conflict perished not in combat but as a result of “preventable diseases” caused by bad hygiene. Nightingale invented the polar area chart (shown below), a variant of the pie chart, meant “to affect thro’ the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.” Each pie represented a twelve-month period of the war, with each slice showing the number of deaths per month, growing outward if the number increased, and color-coded to show the causes of death (blue: preventable, red: wounds, black: other). The New York Times showed the seasonal pattern of COVID cases using a somewhat similar chart.

Source: Wikipedia

In the dashboard below, Curtis Harris reveals not only patterns in taxi rides by time of day but also by day of the week. We can see, for example, that few people are using taxis between 2 and 3 am, particularly at the beginning of the week. (Click on this viz to see interactive version.)

Source: Curtis Harris on Tableau Public

This varsity-level viz (below) by Lindsay Betzendahl shows the seasonality of the flu. Each dot represents one week in a particular year. Each “ray” consists of dots for the same week of different years. So the ray at the 12:00 position represents the first week in January for each year between 2007 to 2018. The size of the dots show the number of influenza cases. So we can see that cases surge during the winter weeks, in general, but we also can see outbreaks during other seasons in particular years. Betzendahl explains how to create such a chart in Tableau here.

Source: Lindsay Betzendahl on Tableau Public

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.

How To Recognize and Reform Vanity Metrics

Reposted from March 2022

Vanity metrics are like cheap, trendy sunglasses. They may help you to look cool, briefly, but they don’t last long and do little to improve your eyesight. You’ve seen vanity metrics, even if you haven’t used this term to describe them. They are those flashy statistics (sometimes called “big ass numbers”) and charts showing how many services an organization has provided or people they’ve served or some other seemingly impressive stat. The problem is that these metrics don’t help you to better understand your current work and improve it. In this tip, I’ll give you some quick advice on recognizing and reforming vanity metrics.

How To Recognize A Vanity Metric

This Tableau article suggests three questions to ask to identify a vanity metric. I’ve put a nonprofit spin on each:

  • What decision can we make with the metric? If the metric can’t help you to make a decision, it’s probably a vanity metric. For example, does knowing how many meals you delivered help you to decide who, what, where, when, or how to deliver meals in the future? Or do you need a more specific metric such as the gap between need and service provision for various subgroups of clients?

  • What can we do to intentionally reproduce the result? Did some random event produce the big number? For example, did you see a bump in the number of participants last year because another organization, providing a similar service, closed down? If you cannot consistently reproduce the same result next year, this isn’t a helpful metric.

  • Is the data a real reflection of the truth? Let’s face it. There are always ways to misrepresent the truth. You can tell the world that attendance at all of your programs last year totaled 3,237. Sounds good, but that’s probably a “duplicated number” and can be misleading depending on what you want to understand or broadcast to the world. Some people likely attended more than one program. So the total number of individuals who participated in any program could be much lower. The central question to ask yourself when considering a metric is whether or not it will help your organization achieve its goals. If your goal is to reach more folks, this metric is not helpful.

How To Reform A Vanity Metric

  • Provide context. The metrics that are worthy of your attention and your stakeholders’ attention are those that are directly related to your goals. You may have overall goals for all of your participants, clients, audiences, services, programs, etc. But you also might have specific goals for subsets of those groups and for specific time periods. Present your metrics in relation to the goals. And compare metrics for subgroups to each other to see where you are making progress and where you are not.

  • Use more than one statistic. Sometimes what you want to improve cannot be measured with just one metric. For example, if you aim to improve the diversity of your staff, you may want to look at a set of metrics together including number, tenure, and seniority of staff by race/ethnicity, gender identification, age, etc.

Sources: Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics, Stanford Social Innovation Review and Vanity Metrics: Definition, How To Identify Them, And Examples, Tableau.

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.

How To Visualize What Could Have Been or Might Be

In English, there are three verbal moods:

  • The indicative used to express factual statements or positive beliefs;

  • The imperative used to express direct commands, requests, and prohibitions; and

  • The subjunctive used to express hypothetical situations or conditions which are contrary to fact or uncertain.

When we are visualizing data, we often settle into the indicative, the realm of facts. But what if we want to show what might happen if action is not taken or what might have been had action not been taken? In other words, how can we visualize the subjunctive? I’d like to offer up four examples to inspire you. The Flattening The Curve chart shows the impact of COVID mitigation (social distancing, masking, etc.) on the healthcare system and should bring back memories of 2020. The other charts may be new to you.

 
 
 

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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.

Another Data Viz Resource You Should Know: USAFacts

Here’s a new addition to my highly-curated resources list: USAFacts. I occasionally write a 60-second data tip describing a particular resource, including why I think it’s cool. And I link each of these tips to a resources list on my website.

What is it?

USAFacts is dedicated to making government data more accessible. The idea is to help people understand where their tax dollars are going and to help those working on issues of concern in the philanthropic, nonprofit, and public sectors to easily access information to inform their decisions.

Who’s it for?

The general public, policymakers, philanthropists, nonprofit managers, and researchers, among others.

Who’s behind it?

After he retired from tech and began to focus on philanthropy, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wanted to understand what the government spends on programs to help people and the outcomes of those programs. However, unlike businesses, US governments are not mandated to compile reports on their expenditures. He then hired data analysts to compile this data, and this was the origin of USAFacts, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative which is solely funded by Ballmer.

Why I think it’s cool

It’s free and the data is shared under a Creative Commons license. They only ask that you credit USAFacts when using their curated material. Most of their data is visualized and all of it is well-documented. Charts can be easily downloaded in an image format or embedded into your website using an embed code like the chart below.

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.

Emphasize The Shape of Your Data

“There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation — the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.” – Henry D. Hubbard in the preface to William C. Brinton’s Graphic Presentation, 1939.

Data visualization translates words and numbers into visual cues such as color, size, position, and shape. Humans can process such visual cues much more easily and quickly than words and numbers. Today, I’m here to talk about shape because I don’t think we turn to shape often enough to engage and educate with data. The three area charts below provide a great example of the power of shape. The charts show estimates of the distribution of annual income among all world citizens over the last two centuries. By considering the change in the shape of the data across the three time periods and in relation to the poverty line, we learn a lot. Most significantly, we learn that, over the 215 year time period, the majority of people went from living below the poverty line to living above it. We learn even more by considering the shape of the distribution for each color-coded region.

So consider taking a page from this playbook. Rather than showing change over time in one chart. Consider using shape to tell the story by showing the distribution of something (e.g. income, course grades, number of clients) at different time periods in adjacent area charts.

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.

This Is A Teenager: Showing The People Behind The Data

My tip this week is to check out This Is A Teenager by Alvin Chang at The Pudding. It’s a visual essay that traces the paths of hundreds of teenagers, starting in 1997, to see how their childhood experiences relate to their life outcomes. You can view it in video form (see below) or as a scrolling visualization HERE. The actual teenagers behind the data* don’t get lost in aggregates represented by bars, lines, and circles. Instead, we see them as individuals whose lives tend to follow the paths of other individuals with similar childhood experiences.

* The data is from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Source: The Pudding

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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.