Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 2)

“Every artist gets asked the question: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them.’ . . . What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before.” —Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist.

Recently, I recommended that you steal ideas from this data viz . Today I offer up another steal-worthy interactive viz that I came across in the Tableau Public Gallery.

Source: Ellen Blackburn on Tableau Public

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

• Vertical Timeline. The vertical timeline looks cool and works better than a horizontal one on a phone screen.

• Self-Explanatory Chart. Each action by the Trump Administration is represented by a square. I would have stated this in the subtitle, but I think the chart is pretty self-explanatory once you begin interacting with it (give it a try). It’s easy to see when there were more or fewer actions and what proportion of actions are considered anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans.

• Detail on Demand. When you scroll over the squares, you get a lot more detail on the particular actions. But none of this detail is visible until you start scrolling. So the details do not obscure the overall patterns and change over time.

• Controlled color palette. Using just two colors for the squares and one color for the text lets the patterns shine through. Also, the off-white background looks like a piece of paper, making the viz seem more approachable.

To see past data tips, 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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Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 1)

“Every artist gets asked the question: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them.’ . . . What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before.” —Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist.

Today’s tip is to steal ideas from other data visualizations. Here’s a viz I recently came across in the Tableau Public Gallery:

Source: Jacqui Moore on Tableau Public

I’ve stacked the four squares below so that you can see it close up. And here’s what I suggest you steal from this viz:

• Simple charts. The viz has only two types of charts: bar charts and line graphs. And they are so simple to read. Distracting elements (like axes and gridlines) are eliminated so that you can easily compare the world to North America, both now and over time.

• Repetition of charts. The same charts are repeated for each of four categories, making comparison among categories quite easy.

• Images. The simple images relating to mountains, terrestrial, freshwater, and marine help us to distinguish among the four categories and add visual appeal.

• Controlled color palette. The viz focuses attention on the four categories by diverging from the monochromatic color scheme only in the images.

I look forward to sharing other steal-worthy data visualizations with you in future data tips! To see past data tips, 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.

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Understand Your Budget Using "Pantry Staple" Data

Budget data is another staple in our data pantries. We need our staff, board members, funders, clients, and other stakeholders to understand this data. But many of them are not comfortable with financial spreadsheets. Here are some ways to present budget data that allow others to gain quick insight and, perhaps, dig deeper. These examples all come from the public sector but are easily applied to a nonprofit organization’s budget.

2016 U.S. Budget

The Obama administration made the Byzantine federal budget accessible to the world through this simple treemap. We can see where the lion's share of the money goes and which areas receive relatively little funding. Click HERE to see the interactive version which provides more information when you scroll over or click on a rectangle. Treemaps are easy to make in Tableau, Excel, and other apps.

Source: Obama White House Archives

School District of Philadelphia Budget

I find this sunburst chart daunting in static form. But check out the interactive version HERE. If you scroll over the inner ring, you can see that 96 percent of funds went to school budgets. Then move to successive outer rings to see how school and administrative budgets break down into smaller categories. You can build sunburst charts in Excel and other apps.

Source: Code for Philly

Oak Park, Illinois Budget

This interactive area chart showing the Oak Park, IL budget emphasizes change over time in the area chart at the top. But you can click on any year to see how the budget broke down by funds in the bar chart below. If you click on the downward arrow next to a given fund, you get even more detailed information on that fund. You can build this type of interactive viz in Tableau.

Source: BudgetOakPark.com

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.

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Understand Donations Using "Pantry Staple" Data

The vast majority of nonprofits have some type of list of donors and donations. Tell me that you don’t have a database or spreadsheet that looks something like this.

Use Case: Tracking Progress to Goal

Now tell me that this data would not be way more useable in this interactive dashboard. Give it a try. You can see both how you are doing overall in relation to your goal and how different types of donors and donations are contributing to your progress. This dashboard can be created using Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau.

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.

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How to Put The Viewer In The Viz

Here’s a surefire way to engage your donors, staff, board members, and others in your data: put them in it. I’ve talked about how to place the “viewer in the viz” before. And The New York Times recently reminded me just how powerful this strategy can be.

This series of interactive visualizations from The New York Times shows you, right out of the gates, whether you live in a Democratic or Republican bubble. Then it zooms out to zip code areas near you and finally focuses on the segregated political landscape in the U.S. more generally.

I recommend you interact with the NYT viz and let it inspire you. Think about how you can engage various stakeholders in your data by using a similar technique. For example, show viewers . . .

• How close they are to a problem. Rather than present statistics on food insecurity in your region, ask viewers to enter their zip code to see how many families near them don’t have consistent access to healthy food.

• How accurate their understanding of an issues is. Ask them how many women experience domestic abuse or how many children experience poverty, and then show them how far off the mark they are. Check out this example!

• How their habits or lifestyle contribute to—or help to reduce—a problem. Check out this Carbon Footprint Calculator for a great example.

• What category they fall into. We all love to discover groups we belong to. Think of Harry Potter’s sorting hat. Consider elucidating an issue by showing viewers where they fall in relation to that issue. That’s what I did with this data personality viz.

And no, you don’t need to be a tech wiz to make these types of interactive visualizations. You can make them using Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau (or a similar data viz application) and embed them in your website. I’m also happy to create something like this for you.

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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 Your Volunteers Using "Pantry Staple" Data

If your organization is like most nonprofits, you rely on volunteers to get the job done. And you probably have at least some basic “pantry staple” data on volunteers.

Pantry Staple Data: Volunteer Data

The volunteer data you already have can be leveraged to:

• Impress funders, donors, and other stakeholders. Show them how you are using this free resource to move the needle.

• Recruit new volunteers. As we have discussed in this blog before, we are all influenced by peers. So show how many volunteers you have to attract even more.

• Manage volunteers more effectively. Seeing clearly what’s going on with your volunteers will help you to retain them, make better use of them, and recruit new ones. This is the subject of today’s tip.

Use Case: Maximizing Volunteer Time and Value

This volunteer data dashboard uses a variety of charts to answer the who, what, where, and when questions that you may have about your volunteers. With this detailed view of volunteers, an organization can start thinking about how to activate inactive volunteers, what types of new volunteers to target, and when during the year to deploy volunteers.

Source: Jin Tat on Tableau Public

This simple map dashboard provides insight into the distribution of volunteers—and volunteer hours—among sites. This understanding can help you decide if and how to redistribute volunteers. Both this dashboard and the one above can be created using Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau.

Source:CCE on Tableau Public

To see past data tips, 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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How To Show The Real People Behind The Data

Data visualizations can provide something that photos and case studies—for all of their visceral appeal—cannot. Context. Charts, maps, and graphs give us the critical context that we cannot see in a photo or in a story about one person, such as how prevalent a problem is, where it is occurring, or the impact of a program over time.

Data visualizations, of course, also have a downside. A chart, map, or graph is an abstraction that aggregates the stories of many individuals. And, as Joshua Smith points out: “It’s really hard to tell a powerful story in aggregate when all of the humans and all of their lives and moments and emotions are plotted under a single data point, often represented through a behavioral variable, e.g. “sales”, or “likes”. In aggregate, we lose all the parts and pieces that make characters relatable and memorable.”

So can we have the best of both worlds? Can we put photos and other information about real people into data visualizations? Yes! Consider one of these strategies.

Follow Individuals Through The Data

The idea is to explain an issue, a problem, or a situation through the stories of select individuals. Ludovic Tavernier explains the the situation of Somali refugees through the stories of two Somali women. Ayaan and Shamshi, in a series of visualizations entitled Two Years Late. Tavernier labels particular data points to show where Ayaan and Shamshi fit into the larger picture.

Source: Ludovic Tavernier (on Tablea Public)

Dot = Person

Another approach is to make each mark (e.g. dot, square, bar) represent an actual person and allow the viewer to scroll over marks to learn more about these individuals. This is Eve Thomas’ strategy in Stop and Search which shows the disproportionate rate at which Black people are stopped and searched in London.

Source: Eve Thomas (on Tableau Public)

Here’s another example from JR Copreros in which each dot represents a real person who was convicted of a crime and later exonerated.

Source: JR Copreros (on Tableau Public)

Show Both The Forest and The Trees

Perhaps the simplest strategy is to include both aggregated data (the forest) and disaggregated data (the trees) in the same visualization. The chart below shows the number of absences for both individual students and the average number of absences across all students.

Filter Charts By Individuals

Another way to zoom in on particular trees is to include a filter that allows you to show results for just one person. This visualization by David Borczuk allows you to choose just one woman in Madagascar who suffered from obstetric fistula, a medical condition in which a hole develops in the birth canal as a result of childbirth.

Source: David Borczuk (on Tableau Public)

On the lighter side, you can click on any character in Glee to learn more about that character in various charts in this data dashboard by Jennifer Dawes.

To see past data tips, 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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How to Show Problems and Solutions in One Chart

Data visualizations are kind of like beards or kale. They used to be decidedly uncool, but are now hip, at least in certain circles. Yet, even with the rising popularity of charts, maps, and graphs, I think many of us have a faint feeling of aversion when encountering them. For one, they may be hard to decipher. But there’s another problem too. They often are the bearers of bad news. They show us how widespread a problem is or how it’s increasing. Worse, they rarely give us any hope of improvement.

Wouldn’t charts, maps, and graphs be more engaging and helpful if they showed both problems AND solutions? Let’s talk about how to get that done.

Show Two Scenarios

Show the difference between how things play out with and without an intervention or program. The now-famous flatten the curve graph (shown below) did this without any real data. The point was just to show how the number of cases would likely differ with and without public health measures to slow the spread of COVID.

Source: C.T. Bergstrom

Here’s a graph that shows two scenarios with real data. The data point labels are particularly helpful in this example. By comparing two different cities, the graph suggests that a delay in the start of social distancing interventions may have a huge effect on the severity of an outbreak.

Source: Washington Post

Show A Change In The Trend

Another way to present a problem along with a solution is to show how a trend alters following an intervention. This graph shows projected data for several types of interventions: the current policy, alternative policies, and the absence of policies. In the absence of policies, global warming is expected to reach 4.1°C – 4.8°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Current policies are projected to result in about a 3.0° rise over pre-industrial levels. Other pledges and targets that governments have made would limit warming to even lower amounts.

Source: Climate Action Tracker

This one effectively uses bubble size and color to show a trend alteration following the introduction of the measles vaccine.

Source: Sciencemag.org

On the uncool-to-very-cool spectrum, data visualizations that show both problems and solutions are very cool. To see what other things are cool/uncool check out CoolnessGraphed.com.

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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How To Use Big A** Numbers

You already know about BANs even if you don’t think you do. They are Big Ass Numbers meant to catch your attention. You see them everywhere these days, featured in bold fonts on websites, brochures, and reports; sprinkled throughout PowerPoint presentations; and arrayed as KPIs* in data dashboards.

BANs are having a moment. And they can be powerful. But watch out for overdoing it. When lots of BANs crowd a single display, they steal each other’s limelight and bewilder the audience. Anyone who gives a BAN a moment’s thought might wonder: “Wow, 5,000 meals sounds like a lot, but what is the need? What do similar organizations provide?”

So use BANs sparingly and give them space so they can shine. Also, provide context when possible: “5,000 meals served and no one turned away.”

Steve Wexler also advises using one or two BANs when they provide a good overall summary of a lot of data and when they clarify and provide context for subsequent charts, maps, and graphs.

And for some great ways to design BANs, check out Adam McCann’s 20 Ways to Visualize KPIs.

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

*key performance indicators

How To Show Your Organization's Pre- and Post-COVID Data

It’s time to reconsider your plans for showing progress in 2020. The chart, map, or graph you planned to use on your website, in your annual report, or at the quarterly board meeting may no longer apply or may tell the wrong story. The lives of those you serve and the way you serve them probably have changed. The question is: how can you show progress and provide enough context so that viewers get it right and get it quickly. Below are some ideas. If your organization has come up with other solutions, please let me know, and I’ll share them in a future data tip.

1. Distinguish pre- and post-COVID periods

This is the simplest solution. Make sure to distinguish the COVID period in your charts using color, shading, borders, and captions. Viewers will expect to see differences between pre- and post-COVID periods. So show them where to apply these different expectations.

2. Emphasize COVID period

You might consider emphasizing the COVID period by enlarging it and showing an adjusted goal for this time. Even if your service capacity has decreased, you could be doing well compared to adjusted goals.

3. Discourage pre/post comparisons

In some cases, you may want to discourage pre- and post-COVID comparisons given how much circumstances have changed. You might show only the COVID period, perhaps along with an adjusted goal reference line.

4. Focus on adaptation over time

Although some programs and services may have come to a screeching halt, others may have ramped up speedily. There are plenty of ways to show these changes in charts that clearly distinguish both periods.

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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When Is Nothing Something You Should Show?

Data visualization is all about making what’s invisible or not-immediately-perceptible in the outside world visible and clear. You can’t see the range and strength of your clients’ feelings about the programs you offer, but you can show them on a chart. You can’t see the impact of air pollution across thousands of miles from where you stand, but you can see it on a map. In both of these examples, data visualizations show the presence of something. Can they also show the absence of something? And when is nothing something you really should show?

In last week’s data tip, I shared this cartoon which I love because it makes the absence of something — COVID cases averted by individual actions — perceptible with gray lines and dots. That got me thinking about how we visualize the absence of things in charts, maps, and graphs.

See animated version of the cartoon here.

A common problem in almost any endeavor involving data is “missing data.” This is data that was not collected because, for example, a respondent skipped a survey question or someone did not fill in a data field in a database. And often missing data is eliminated from charts, maps, and graphs. We don’t show what we don’t know. But that can be a mistake, especially when the majority of data is missing such as in this pie chart. By showing the amount of unknown and missing values, it emphasizes the need for better data collection so that we can understand which groups are most affected.

source: WBUR

These maps (from March 2020) stress the absence of certain policies rather than the presence of them.

source: Politico

The colors gray or white often are used to signify the absence of something. But this chart uses green to draw your attention to the times when NONE of Britain’s power was generated by coal, presumably helping to make for a greener environment.

source: The Guardian

Zero points on axes also help to show the absence of something. This chart emphasizes the point on the X-axis representing no bias with a red line.

source: The Economist

Consider what absences may be instructive to your staff, board members, funders, clients, or participants. Perhaps it’s the absence of data or the absence of revenue or the absence of problems following an intervention or the absence of essential services in a community. Remember showing nothing can be just as enlightening as showing something.

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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Why Your Donors, Volunteers, and Activists Ignore Data

(And What You Can Learn From The Pandemic)

Here are three things we are seeing a lot of these days:

1. Charts, maps, and graphs showing increasing COVID cases in many parts of the country,

2. Appeals to the public to wear masks and social distance when out in public, and

3. People out in public NOT wearing masks and not social distancing.

What gives? I talk a lot about using data viz to shorten the journey from data to action. And, indeed, it can reduce travel times by bringing into focus the message behind the data. But even when our audience clears this first hurdle of understanding what the data show, they confront other hurdles that delay or prevent effective action. These hurdles are likely behind rising COVID cases, and they are likely behind challenges at your organization.

A May 2020 article in Nature Human Behaviour sheds some light on different types of barriers between data and action. A few obstacles that are pertinent to nonprofit organizations are:

• Fear. Those rising COVID slopes can evoke fear. So can data that your organization shares to raise funds, get volunteers, or spur activism (on violence, hunger, health needs, etc. ) Research findings suggest that fear only leads to behavior change when people feel capable of dealing with the threat. Otherwise, it can shut down action. So those rising slopes may be more effective when coupled with information that increases viewers’ sense of efficacy in the face of the problem such as: “Your donation of $100 will provide 50 meals to families in need.”

• Perceived Norms. You’ve heard it before. We are social animals and are keenly affected by the behavior of others. However, research shows we often are wrong about what other folks are doing. So even if we see the danger in charts, we may do the wrong thing to match our perception of the social norm. In this situation, we need some information to correct our perceptions. For example, charts showing that most people are wearing masks or that those whom we admire are wearing masks can help. Similarly, we can show potential donors, volunteers, and activists what others are doing or giving to prompt action.

• Individual Interest. Fighting a pandemic, reducing poverty, addressing climate change, among other aims, require each of us to bear an individual cost for the common good. Charts may suggest how dire the situation is, but it’s hard to relate these big issues to our daily behaviors. We feel the effects of our individual sacrifices, but the impact of those sacrifices on the larger community is harder to perceive — particularly when the impact is invisible because it’s a problem that has been prevented. Research suggests that we can overcome individual interests by providing cues that make the morality of an individual action more clear. Check out this brilliant cartoon which shows COVID cases averted with gray lines. Consider how your organization can show your stakeholders how their (in)actions affect the wider community.

See animated version of the cartoon here.

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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Covid Haircuts vs. Covid Charts, Which Are Worse? (And What Can We Learn From Them?)

Image sources: crafty.diply.com, cancerletter.com

Remember the old TV warning: Don’t try this at home? Well, many of us are home right now. And we are trying lots of new stuff. Like cutting our own hair or visualizing data. Both can be dangerous.

We’ve already talked about the limitations of COVID data and the importance of both broadcasting limitations when presenting data and seeking out such disclaimers when consuming data in any format. Charts, maps, and graphs attempting to show the severity of the pandemic across time and location run into many difficulties including differences in population sizes and densities, testing rates, and reporting policies of various states and countries. The result is a likely misrepresentation of reality. (For more on this, see The Covid Tracking Project at the Atlantic’s Visualization Guide.)

The misrepresentation can be even more severe when visualizations distort the data. Much of the distortion, intentional or otherwise, occurs along the X and Y axes.* So when designing or reading charts, pay attention to:

1. The order of values along the axes

Source:cancerletter.com

This graph, from the Georgia Department of Public Health's website, is now infamous. The original chart (see “Before” image) did not present the dates along the X-axis in chronological order. Moreover, the bars, which each represent a different county, were presented in different orders on different dates. The result “seemed to bend both time and place to achieve a clean descending-staircase effect,” wrote Morgan McFall-Johnsen at The Business Insider on May 17, 2020. The corrected version was later posted and, as you can see, told a different story. When presenting values that have an inherent order, such as dates, we should present them in that order such as earlier to later or lower to higher.

2. The span of values along the axes

It’s easy enough to choose the part of a chart that tells the story you want to tell and just omit the rest. So when you see a trend over time, always check the X-axis to see the span of time covered. If relevant time periods are not included, find out why.

3. The range of values along the axes

The lowest point on an axis is called the “origin.” It’s where the Y and X axes intersect. Much has been written about the importance of starting the Y-axis at zero because, when you don’t, you can make a small difference look like a big one. See the two bar charts here for a case in point.

4. The aggregation of values along the axes

When you combine values by computing sums, averages, counts, etc., it's called aggregating. The way values are aggregated along the axes can significantly affect the way the data look. For example, when using date values, consider how detailed of a story you want to tell. Do you want to show general trends or is it important to show the volatility over shorter intervals of time? The charts below show the same data at different levels of aggregation: week totals, month totals, and quarter totals.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

*What is an axis (plural: axes)?

Data visualizations, like charts, maps, and graphs, often use position to show the value of something. They usually do this using an intersecting X-axis (a horizontal line) and a Y-axis (a vertical line). Each axis shows a particular type of measurement such as dates, dollars, or miles or particular categories or groups. Lines, bars, or other shapes are positioned according to these measures and categories.

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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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Managing Amid Uncertainty: What You Can Know and Show

Does your organization feel like the guy in the picture above? Heretofore, you and your colleagues have been climbing a challenging mountain. The journey has been daunting at times but despite occasional setbacks, your trend has been upward. And just as you were ready to take on the next steep incline, you encounter a cliff — or at least what feels like a cliff. The path ahead is foggy and uncertain.

How to deal with the uncertainty that the pandemic had brought into most aspects of life, including our work? One response is to try to bring the present and possible future into focus through charts, maps, and graphs. “In many ways, data visualization has been instrumental to how we’re processing COVID-19,” writes Stephen Gossett at Built In. “The Washington Post’s animated-dots simulation became the paper’s most-viewed article ever.” But Gossett goes on to describe the dangers of visualizing uncertain data. As I wrote in an earlier data tip on “Low-CAL” data, data visualizations can make situations appear more certain than they actually are. We should look for the fine print that describes Context, Assumptions, and Limitations and be wary of visualizations that lack this information.

So what can you confidently know and show about your organization now?

• Your past efficacy or impact. It’s a good time to dust off old charts. Or better yet, revive past data with new and improved visualizations that show your staff, board, and current and prospective supporters how well you have done in the past and thus how worthy of investment your organization is.

• Your ability to adapt. For extra credit, show your stakeholders how well you have adapted to changes in the past, particularly unexpected ones. Show in charts how you resurged after a cut in public funding or how you built new programs to address unexpected needs in your community.

• Your current efforts. Show how much money and person hours you have invested, how many people you have served, how many funds you have raised, or how you have redirected resources to new programs.

Even amid all of the uncertainty, there are some “known knowns” (in the words of former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld). While we are waiting for the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” to come into focus, we can move forward by showing what we do know.

 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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Top 3 Things You Should Know About Rankings (And How To Visualize Them)

1. We love lists, listicles, and rankings in particular, because they make assessment easier. We hate information overload. Ranked lists show us what information is most important and so ease decision-making.

2. We are more likely to remember items at the top and bottom of the lists and forget the items in the middle. So shorter lists are easier to retain.

3. People also BELIEVE shorter lists more than longer ones.

 3 Ways to Visualize Rankings

1. Bar Charts (like the one above)

2. Rank Charts (which are good for showing how ranking changes over time)

3. Stacked Bar Charts (scroll down to see the mother of all stacked bar charts showing the top 100 colleges by diversity)

For more on the power of rankings, check out this podcast from  the Kellogg School Of Management At Northwestern University. And here is the full version of the viz shown above:

You can find the ARTICLE in which this viz appeared on the World Economic Forum website.

I found this chart on Grafiti.

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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.

How To Squeeze MUCH More Information From Your Surveys (Repost)

Surveys are such a common data source for nonprofits. And I get so many questions about how to make better use of survey data, that I’m reposting this tip which originally appeared in June 2018.

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Surveys provide answers to many nonprofit questions.  How do participants like this program? What are barriers to enrollment? What types of services do community members lack and need?

It’s easy enough to create a survey on Survey Monkey or the like. It's harder to get an adequate number of responses.  And even when you do, the respondents might not fairly represent the larger group you want to know about. But let’s say you get past this hurdle. There’s still a major hurdle ahead of you: extracting meaning from your data.

Surveys include different types of questions. Perhaps the most common one is the Likert scale question. You have seen them a million times. Respondents are asked to indicate how much they agree or disagree with a particular statement using a five to seven point scale.

Let’s say you want to know participants’ feelings about a program. Your Likert scale statements might be; “I feel that I can ask the instructor for help when I’m confused” or “I feel comfortable interacting with the other participants in the program.” Survey Monkey will give you each respondent’s rating of each statement and will also give you the average rating. What meaning can you extract from these numbers?

Many organizations will use just the averages to determine where they are doing well and where they need to worker harder or differently. But there is so much more information in those numbers than averages can tell you, including:

The extremes: Averages can’t tell you what were the lowest or highest ratings on any given statement.

What most respondents said: Averages also can’t tell you if the average is three because most people responded with a “3” or because half responded with a 5 and half responded with a 1.

What subgroups think and feel: Even though the overall average might be high, the average might be low for some subgroups within your group of respondents. Perhaps respondents from a certain neighborhood, for example, had very different opinions than the group overall.

You can extract and show this information using data visualization tools like Tableau that allow you to interact with your data. The viz below shows the range of responses to each survey statement and the proportion of responses for each rating. Moreover, the interactive version allows you to “drill down” into the data and see how the results change overtime. We could also construct the visualize to show us results for different subgroups.

If you are going to go to the trouble of conducting a survey, make sure to squeeze all of the information you can from the data you collect.

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

Embrace Redundancy

Redundancy gets a bad rap. It’s almost always mentioned as something to avoid. Graphic novelist Nate Powell cautions. “As a visual storyteller, a lot is learning what to include so you're not being redundant between images and text.”

But some research by Michelle Borkin and colleagues points in a different direction. They found that “redundancy was helpful in improving visualization recall and in improving viewers’ understanding of the data being presented. This was true whether it was data redundancy (like labeling your bar chart values, or dual-encoding data) or message redundancy (including the same message in a title, an annotation, a label, a pictogram, etc.)” (Quote from: “How to get people to remember your visualization” by Mike Cisneros and Lilach Manheim.)

Other psychological research also suggests that redundancy can be a friend to memory. (See this research, for example.) And it makes intuitive sense. Perhaps redundancy is good for the same reason you want it on the space shuttle: if one component doesn’t work, it’s good to have a back up. Perhaps it’s just the power of repetition. In either case, it’s a good way to make sure your primary message gets through.

Check out the example below. The main message is that there are a lot of vaccines in development. This is communicated by the title, the number of circles, and the data labels.

Source: https://beta.grafiti.io/facts/1048338

And for more on how to capture attention with data visualizations, check out this data tip and this one and this one too!

Data Viz for Nonprofits helps organizations to effectively and beautifully present their data on websites, reports, slide decks, interactive data dashboards and more. Click HERE to learn more about our services and HERE to set up a meeting to discuss how we can meet your particular needs.

The Most Important Element of Any Chart

After you have chosen a chart type and labored to make it clear and engaging, you still haven’t done the most important part. You haven’t given it a title. And it turns out that “YOUR TITLE IS SUPER IMPORTANT. It’s the thing people look at for the longest, the thing they build the strongest association with, and the thing they’re most likely to remember” according to data visualization research described in “How to get people to remember your visualization” by Mike Cisneros and Lilach Manheim.

So don’t give the title short shrift. Consider what your viewers/readers might want to know. What would capture their attention? What would make them want to learn more? Below are some visualizations posted on Grafiti. The “before” images show their original titles. The “after” images show my new and improved titles. See what you think.

And for more on how to capture the attention with data visualizations, check out this data tip and this one too.

Data Viz for Nonprofits help organizations to effectively and beautifully present their data on websites, reports, slide decks, interactive data dashboards and more. Click HERE to learn more about our services and HERE to set up a meeting to discuss how we can meet your particular needs.

Add This To Make Your Charts Memorable

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 perceived is based, in part, on what we expect to perceive due to memories of 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.

And for more on how to capture the attention with data visualizations, check out this data tip.

Data Viz for Nonprofits helps organizations to effectively and beautifully present their data on websites, reports, slide decks, interactive data dashboards and more. Click HERE to learn more about our services and HERE to set up a meeting to discuss how we can meet your particular needs.

 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