Seeing Red, Blue, and Purple - What We Can Learn From Election Maps

A wide range of election maps are in your immediate future. What you learn from those maps depends, in part, on how they are designed. Indeed, election maps and other types of maps can change our attitudes toward issues. In this 15-second tip, I recommend that you invest an additional couple of minutes watching The New York Times’ excellent slide show on how election maps can fool you. It will help you to be both a better consumer and designer of maps.

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

Tap Into The Mighty Flowchart

Behold the power of the flowchart. They are engaging, easy to digest, and charmingly analog. Don’t forget to use them to:

• Show how simple or complex a process is.

• Guide your viewer, quickly, to the info they need. That’s the goal of my “Do You Plan To Vote?” chart pictured above. Check out the interactive version here.

• Explain all stages of a process such as how clients move through your job training program or how donors move through the cultivation process.

See other data tips in this series for more information on how to effectively visualize and make good use of your organization's data.