Data Viz Humor

For my last post of the year, I give you 60 seconds of data viz humor. ICYMI, How I Met Your Mother did a great bit on charts and graphs back in 2009. If you like this, you might want to checkout Chart Chat’s recent discussion of the Top Ten Charts on TV.

To see past data tips, including those about other chart types, scroll down or 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 Present Diversity Data (or What To Steal From This Diversity Scorecard)

Reposted from February 2022

Today’s tip is to take inspiration from Chantilly Jaggernauth’s excellent diversity scoreboard displayed below. It shows diversity among employees in a company but can easily be applied to staff or participants in a nonprofit organization.

I suggest you steal the following ideas from Chantilly:

  • Metric Definitions. In a Tableau Conference session, Chantilly shares the pros and cons of the four metrics in the dashboard. See image of the slide below. None of the metrics are perfect. But together they provide an understanding of where an organization is in its diversity efforts. These definitions are not incorporated in the dashboard itself but could be added through a link or in a tooltip (scroll over) feature.*

  • Views of Diversity. The dashboard provides three views of diversity: overall, gender, and people of color (POC). By providing side-by-side charts with these three views, the dashboard allows users to see variations that overall diversity charts obscure.

  • Color Coding. Each type of diversity has its own color, which makes the comparison among overall, gender, and POC easy, even when you scroll down and can no longer see the column headers. Also the comparison groups (non-diversity, male, and non-POC) are represented by the same colors in lighter shades. This approach makes the dashboard easier to understand. Assigning three additional colors for the comparison groups could be confusing and require a color legend.

  • Simple Charts. These are all charts we all know how to read. So the scorecard is accessible immediately to anyone, even if they are not familiar with the data or the organization.

  • Also, note that the dashboard and the slide use different terms for two of the metrics.

Source: HR Diversity Scorecard on Tableau Public by Lovelytics

Image above from Tableau Conference session called “Next Gen Analytics for Your New Normal” on 11/10/21.


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.

Context is King

Reposted from July 2023

This “sketchplanation” elegantly demonstrates the importance of context in understanding anything. Since data visualizations are supposed to help people understand something, we should pay close attention to context when creating them, adding as much context as is needed for others to appreciate what’s going on and act on it. Considering the following charts . . .

Low-context chart

This is your garden variety chart. I see them all the time. Sure, it provides some context by comparing clients served in different zip code areas. But it doesn’t give me enough context to understand if these numbers are high, low, or somewhere in between. This chart needs more context.

Moderate-context chart

This chart is better than the one above. By providing the previous year’s numbers, we can see where there has been increases and decreases and how large and small they were as well as compare the number increases (3) to the number of decreases (1).

Moderate-context chart

This chart, too, allows for better assessment of the numbers than the first chart did. By simply adding a reference line for the goal, we have a better understanding of what’s going on and where we might need to take action. A reference line showing the average number of clients per zip code might also be helpful.

High-context chart

This “small multiples chart”* gives us much more context by showing how the current numbers compare to past years. Consider, for example, the trend for 60601. Just knowing the current and past years’ numbers would not give you an appreciation of the overall upward trend.

*Small multiples chart: a series of similar graphs or charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to be easily compared

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 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.

I Used Free ChatGPT To Analyze Survey Data. Here's What I Learned.

1. You collect this type of survey data.

Here’s a familiar scenario. You survey your clients, participants, donors, volunteers, etc. and you include some “Other, please specify” options or other “open-ended” questions to better understand respondents’ opinions, experiences, etc.

2. But you don’t know what to do with it.

You collect your survey data but don’t have the time and/or analytical skills to deal with this qualitative data.* Maybe you create one of those horrible word clouds or, even more likely, you just analyze the quantitative data and ignore the qualitative data.

If you had the time and know-how, you might have “coded” the data in order to analyze it. This involves assigning themes to each open-ended survey response in Excel (or the like) or perhaps using one of these free tools.

*Quantitative data is numerical, countable, or measurable. Qualitative data is interpretation-based, descriptive, and relating to language.

3. But what about AI?

You’ve heard that it’s supposed to make tedious, repetitive tasks much easier, and coding survey responses certainly qualifies as both. Could you use the free version of ChatGPT to get this job done? I shared your curiosity and gave it a try. Bottom line: It helped to identify themes to use as codes but it didn’t do all the work for me. For a little longer description of my experience, keep reading.

4. Prepare for AI.

I watched this YouTube Video based on this article to learn how to craft a prompt that would likely get me what I wanted. I also found free survey data on the City of Chicago Data Portal to use for my experiment. The survey asked 43rd Ward residents about “other priorities” for their ward. I thought I could just upload the CSV data file to Chat, but it turns out you need the paid version for that. So I ended up pasting in the survey answers after entering the prompt. Also note that I used publicly available data. You should think twice about entering any type of sensitive data into Chat.

5. Craft the prompt.

Here it is. Yes, it’s long and yes, I say “please,” although I’m not sure if that affected the results!

6. Here’s what happened.

I first tried pasting in the prompt plus the data but that was too long for Chat. So I had to feed the data (all 23 pages) in batches of about 3 pages at a time and despite entreaties to Chat to update the charts based on ALL of the data I shared so far, it only gave me charts for the last batch I had entered, and I had to combine them in Excel. At first I was impressed with the almost instant tables, but I felt my AI assistant wasn’t quite listening to my instructions or just not understanding them. Still, I did develop this list of themes and Chat did code each survey response according to these themes, but I would not feel comfortable relying on these results and would want to possibly combine some of these themes and read through all the responses to see if I agree with the coding.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

How To Create More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Data Visualizations

Reposted from February 2022

When we visualize information, we make a series of decisions which affect the way that viewers process the information in our charts, maps, and graphs. Sometimes they don’t feel like decisions at all. We go with the default settings in the application we are using. Or we just do something the way it’s usually done. But a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive approach to presenting and visualizing data requires us to make those decisions more consciously and deliberately. Jonathan Schwabish and Alice Feng of the Urban Institute provide some helpful tips, based on the Urban Institute’s own style guide, which you can apply the next time you present data.

Here is a summarized version of Schwabish and Feng’s article.* And here is my 60-second version of their recommendations:

  • Use people-first language in titles, text, and labels associated with charts, maps, and graphs. For example, use “people with disabilities” rather than “disabled people.” Also the Urban Institute does not refer strictly to skin color. For example, they refer to “Black people” not “Blacks.”

  • Order and present groups purposefully. The first group shown in a table or the first bar in a chart can affect how readers perceive the relationship or hierarchy among groups. For example, if the first group is “Men,” then it may appear that men are the default group against which other groups should be compared. One way to prevent viewers from making certain comparisons is to display groups in side-by-side charts (aka “small multiples” charts) rather than on a single chart. In general, make ordering and grouping decisions to promote certain comparisons and prevent others.

  • Point to missing groups. If certain groups are missing from the data, explain why in text boxes or footnotes. Also add information on groups included in “Other” categories and consider providing a more specific label than “Other” which can have an exclusionary connotation.

  • Do not use color palettes that reinforce gender or racial stereotypes. This one may seem obvious, but it bears repeating. Also, the Urban Institute’s color palette is accessible to people with certain color vision deficiencies, and the contrast between those colors and white and black text meet basic accessibility guidelines.

  • Depict a variety of races and genders when using icons and avoid icons that make inappropriate depictions of people or communities or reinforce stereotypes such as showing traditionally feminine icons to depict nurses or traditionally masculine icons to depict bosses.

  • Find ways to show the people behind the data. Data visualizations are, by definition, abstractions of larger realities. But in the process of abstracting, we may obscure the lived experiences of the real people whom the data represent. Visualizations can remind viewers about the individuals behind the data by, for example, depicting them as individual circles rather than aggregating them in a single bar.

* The full paper has been published as an OSF Preprint and can be accessed 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: Data.gov

Here’s a new addition to my highly-curated resources list: Data.gov. 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?

Data.gov is the United States government’s open data site. Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used, and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike. Data.gov is designed to “unleash the power of government open data to inform decisions by the public and policymakers, drive innovation and economic activity, achieve agency missions, and strengthen the foundation of an open and transparent government.”

Who’s it for?

It’s for the general public.

Who’s behind it?

The U.S. government. More specifically, The U.S. General Services Administration, working with the Office of Management and Budget and other agency partners, launched Data.gov in 2009. Government agencies compile metadata such as title, description, keywords, and links for accessing their datasets, and the Data.gov catalog automatically “harvests” that metadata to populate a continually updated catalog.

Why I think it’s cool

Unlike many other open data catalogs, you can find and download data quickly and visualize it. You can begin by searching for keywords in the search box. And there are helpful filters to narrow the results by, for example, topic categories, location, and agency. This is a great place to find data to show the need for your organization’s services and the problems you and your colleagues are working to address.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Power of Substraction

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

If you have heard of any data viz guru, it’s probably Edward Tufte. And if you know one thing about Tufte, it’s probably the data-to-ink ratio. The data-to-ink ratio is the amount of ink (or pixels) that convey the data divided by the total ink (or pixels) used in the entire chart. The ratio, according to Tufte, should be as close to one as possible. In other words, most of the ink/pixels should be conveying data, and you should remove as much non-data ink/pixels as possible. Click through Joey Cherdarchuk’s slides below for a great example of what Tufte is talking about.

Source: Darkhorse Analytics

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 and Why to Visualize Variability

Every dataset includes variability. The people and things we measure differ from one another in many ways. And visualizing data always involves some decisions about how much of that variability to show. There are tradeoffs:

  1. If you show too much variability, you obscure patterns and trends. To understand anything with data, we usually need to reduce its complexity. We can’t extract meaning from a table full of numbers and letters. So we summarize the data through such activities as grouping people, concepts, and time periods; calculating averages; or organizing individuals or groups in a rank order. This process allows us to detect patterns and trends within the data. Patterns and trends become even more apparent when we visualize the data in the form charts, maps, and graphs by assigning visual cues such as color, size, and shape to groups and values. However, too many colors, sizes, and shapes make discerning the patterns and trends more difficult.

  2. If you show too little variability, you obscure reality*. Overly simplified visualizations do not show just how complex and messy the data actually is. And the viewer may mistake the simplified, summarized version of the data as reality.

You can find a great example of problem #2 in Eli Holder’s article Divisive Dataviz: How Political Data Journalism Divides Our Democracy. He describes the danger of red and blue political maps in the U.S. in this way: “there’s no such thing as a “red state” or a “blue state.” Consider Texas, which is often called a “red” state. In the 2020 presidential election, more Texans voted for Joe Biden (5.26 million) than every other “blue” state, except for California. Even New York, a Democratic stronghold, had roughly 20,000 fewer Biden voters than Texas. . . . While popular election maps accurately reflect the ‘winner-take-all’ dynamic of the electoral college, they create the misimpression that state electorates are monolithic blocks of only-Republicans or only-Democrats.”

And the misimpressions such maps engender have real-world consequences. Holder describes an experiment in which people were shown either dichotomous maps or continuous maps (see examples below). Those shown dichotomous maps were more likely than those shown continuous maps to feel that their state was dominated by one party and thus that their votes mattered less because the election outcome was a foregone conclusion.

So when deciding how many shades of gray or circle sizes to show, consider how much summarization is needed to make patterns and trends perceptible without misleading the viewer with an oversimplified view of the data. Take, for example, these three versions of a map. They each show the same CDC chronic illness survey data with a “diverging color palette” in which blue states ranked high on health indexes; orange states ranked low; and gray states were in the middle. The maps differ in the degree of variability shown. Which map allows you to see corridors of good and bad health without oversimplifying the matter?

*More specifically, the full reality of the data. This 60-second data tip doesn’t get into the nature of reality in general!

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 Balance Your Information Diet

Here’s a question for you. And don’t go Googling. Just make your best guess.

Have the number of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. increased or decreased since 2007?

Whatever your answer, you likely drew on your own personal experience as well as images and information from the media when guessing at the answer. Perhaps you drew on some statistics too. But, unless you have expertise in this area, probably not. Stick with me for a minute, and I’ll not only provide an answer to the question but also some insight into how we consume information.

Personal experience, media, and statistics affect how we understand any issue, and there are limits to each of these inputs. So we would do well to understand those limits before acting on our understanding by voting, donating, or making decisions about programs that our organizations operate. Max Roser’s article in Our World in Data (The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics) walks us through some of those limitations:

Personal Experience

“The world is large, and we can experience only very little of it personally,” Roser notes. “For every person you know, there are ten million people you do not know.” Even the most social and well-traveled among us can have only a limited understanding of the world through personal experience. I, for example, do not know anyone personally who has been unhoused, and most of my interactions with people in this situation occur on the street when someone asks me for money. This experience provides no information about the breadth of the problem or the range of experiences with this issue over time.

Media

“This fact is so obvious that it is easy to miss how important it is: everything you hear about anyone who is more than a few dozen meters away, you know through some form of media,” Roser points out. “The news reports on the unusual things that happen on a particular day, but the things that happen every day never get mentioned. This gives us a biased and incomplete picture of the world; we are inundated with detailed news on terrorism but hardly ever hear of everyday tragedies like the fact that 16,000 children die every single day.” If I recently heard a story about a city clearing homeless encampments, I may assess the problem as larger, and if I haven’t heard about anything on the issue in awhile, I may assess it as smaller.

Statistics

“The collection and production of good statistics is a major challenge,” writes Roser. “Data might be unrepresentative in some ways, it might be mismeasured, and some data might be missing entirely.” But, unlike personal experience and the media, it provides a way of assessing the full range of an issue. So it’s important to add statistics, along with personal experience and the media, to our information diet.

To add some statistics to your understanding of homelessness, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. decreased from about 650,000 in 2007 to about 580,000 (about 18 of every 10,000 people) in 2022 according to The 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress.

We should not discount personal experience, the media, or statistics because of their limitations. But we should appreciate their limitations when forming opinions and taking actions based on them. As Roser notes: “Each way of learning about the world has its value. It’s about how we bring them together: the in-depth understanding that only personal interaction can give us, the focus on the powerful and unusual that the news offers, and the statistical view that gives us the opportunity to see everyone.” As described in many tips in this blog, well-designed charts make data/statistics more accessible to everyone and thus allow everyone to see everyone.

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.

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

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.

Free Interactive Viz For You: Giving in the U.S.

As we move into gifting season, I thought I’d toss out a gift to you. It’s a quick interactive viz that you can employ however you see fit. Use it in a website, presentation, or social media post to rightsize folks’ understanding about the state of charitable giving in the U.S. and, perhaps, help to turn the tide. For the link address or embed code, click on the share icon 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.