Are Your Charts Social-Media Ready?

A chart that works beautifully in a report or website falls completely flat on social media. Different context, different rules.

Flourish recently ran a webinar on exactly this, and the core insight was simple: on social media, you have about two seconds to earn someone's attention. That changes everything about how you design.

Here are the principles that stuck with me.

Lead with the hook, not the data. Your chart title isn't a label. It's a headline. Find the surprising moment, the unexpected outlier, the pattern nobody saw coming and put that in the title.

Strip it down. The instinct when making charts is to add: more labels, more context, more color. For social, go the other direction. Ask yourself what you can remove and still have the story come through. Less color, less text, less clutter.

Pass the 5-second test. Can someone read it, grasp the key message, and understand who made it in five seconds? Check for readable text size, strong contrast, clear labels, and your logo, because if it gets reshared, you want credit.

Think format, not just chart. Carousels are getting 11x more interactions on LinkedIn right now. A single chart is a standalone moment. A series of charts is a mini-article with a beginning, middle, and end. Decide which one you're making before you start building.

Nonprofit communicators often have genuinely important data to share such as program outcomes, community trends, impact numbers. The story is already there. The question is whether your chart gives it two seconds to shine.

Tips drawn from Flourish's webinar "Stop the Scroll: Designing Charts for Social Media." Watch the recording 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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What’s Missing From Your Social Media Posts

Reposted from May 2020

You aren’t deploying data viz. When I peruse nonprofit posts, I mostly see:

• Bad photos,

• Headshots,

• Stock images (only some of which clearly relate to the text), or

• No image at all.

Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are like crowded highways packed with billboards. If we add charts, maps, and graphs to our billboards, we can both grab attention and say something meaningful. But the image and message should be simple and clear to travelers zooming by.

What types of vizes work best? Here are four to consider.

1. Maps

If the map shows a geography we know like the U.S. or our own city, we have a lot of prior knowledge that we can apply. This makes maps easy to digest on the fly. We look for our own location. We compare east to west or cities to rural areas. Consider showing the distribution of the need you are addressing, the location of your clientele, or where you are providing services using a map.

Source: tennessean.com, image: feedingamerica.org

2. BANs (Big Ass Numbers)

Just one large number can capture attention. The BANs shown here are from Women Will, a Google initiative focused on economic empowerment for women. They won a Shorty Award, which honors the best content creators on social media. Think about what single number you might share that could spark interest in your work. Add a link from your BAN post to a chart that provides more context and detail for that number.

Source: shortyawards.com

3. Line graph showing a clear trend

Line graphs are familiar. Many show change over time. So if we make it clear what is changing (here it’s number of deaths) and over what period of time, we can tell a quick and powerful story without much more than an angled line. But keep it simple with only one line or multiple lines but only one highlighted in color and the rest grayed out. Consider showing how the need for your services or your impact has changed over time.

source: informationisbeautiful.net

4. Bar chart showing a clear comparison

Bar charts also are trusted friends. We get them. When deploying bar charts, use color strategically to encourage a comparison of a target group to the others. This post from the World Wildlife Fund is a follow-up to an earlier post which asked followers a question. This post gives them the answer in a simple bar chart and shows them what percent of followers guessed each answer (see numbers on the right.)

Source: shortyawards.com                                 i.    

To see past data tips, including those about other chart types, 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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Understand Social Media Impact Using "Pantry Staple" Data

Social media data is another staple in our data pantries. Your organization probably has it. But you might not make good use of it. Why? Well, social media analytics come in many flavors and can bewilder. Posts are like bait. The better the bait, the more nibbles and bites leading to website traffic and eventually to more donations, volunteers, participation, and other types of engagement. But we need a way to easily decipher which types of bait are working best. And drawing this information out of the data can be a challenge.

Need some inspiration? Check out Alice McKnight’s dashboard below. It provides a broad array of social media data in an appealing and accessible format. We can see how effective social media posts are at various times. The charts along the top give us the basic trends over the last several months. It also shows us what topics are drawing attention. Give it a try. Check out the “View By” options which filter the two charts at the bottom. Then consider how you might visualize your own social media data using similar charts.

Source: Alice McKnight on Tableau Public

To see past data tips, including tips on other types of pantry staple data, 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.

---

What’s Missing From Your Social Media Posts

You aren’t deploying data viz. When I peruse nonprofit posts, I mostly see:

• Bad photos,

• Headshots,

• Stock images (only some of which clearly relate to the text), or

• No image at all.

Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are like crowded highways packed with billboards. If we add charts, maps, and graphs to our billboards, we can both grab attention and say something meaningful. But the image and message should be simple and clear to travelers zooming by.

What types of vizes work best? Here are four to consider.

1. Maps

If the map shows a geography we know like the U.S. or our own city, we have a lot of prior knowledge that we can apply. This makes maps easy to digest on the fly. We look for our own location. We compare east to west or cities to rural areas. Consider showing the distribution of the need you are addressing, the location of your clientele, or where you are providing services using a map.

Source: tennessean.com, image: feedingamerica.org

2. BANs (Big Ass Numbers)

Just one large number can capture attention. The BANs shown here are from Women Will, a Google initiative focused on economic empowerment for women. They won a Shorty Award, which honors the best content creators on social media. Think about what single number you might share that could spark interest in your work. Add a link from your BAN post to a chart that provides more context and detail for that number.

Source: shortyawards.com

3. Line graph showing a clear trend

Line graphs are familiar. Many show change over time. So if we make it clear what is changing (here it’s number of deaths) and over what period of time, we can tell a quick and powerful story without much more than an angled line. But keep it simple with only one line or multiple lines but only one highlighted in color and the rest grayed out. Consider showing how the need for your services or your impact has changed over time.

source: informationisbeautiful.net

4. Bar chart showing a clear comparison

Bar charts also are trusted friends. We get them. When deploying bar charts, use color strategically to encourage a comparison of a target group to the others. This post from the World Wildlife Fund is a follow-up to an earlier post which asked followers a question. This post gives them the answer in a simple bar chart and shows them what percent of followers guessed each answer (see numbers on the right.)

Source: shortyawards.com                                 i.    

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

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