A recent New York Times opinion piece by German Lopez offers one of the more striking data visualizations I’ve seen this year. Using polling data from the Searchlight Institute, it shows that roughly half of American voters hold “heterodox” political views — meaning they don’t fall cleanly into liberal or conservative camps. They might support government-provided health care and work requirements for benefits. Or higher taxes on the wealthy and restrictions on government spending. The biggest group in several of the surveys isn’t the liberal one or the conservative one. It’s the one that mixes both.
The visualization that brings this to life is a two-by-two grid. Person icons, colored blue if they self identify as Democrat and colored red if they self identify as Republican, are sorted by how respondents answered two questions at once. It’s simple and immediately legible. You see the four quadrants, you see where the crowd clusters, and the story is obvious: people are more complicated than the categories we put them in.
Nonprofits face a version of this same challenge all the time.
We tend to visualize our clients in ways that flatten them. Demographics are reported one variable at a time: age, race, income level, zip code. But the people you serve sit at the intersection of multiple characteristics simultaneously, and those intersections often tell a more important story than any single variable alone. A two-by-two grid, a scatterplot, or even a simple crosstab can reveal important information that may cause your to rethink how, when, where, or to whom you provide your services.
The NYT article, “This Is Why So Many Voters Hate Both Parties,” by German Lopez, is worth reading in full for the visualizations alone.
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.
