Viz Makeover: The Clustered Bar Chart

I rarely find clustered bar charts to be enlightening. Take this one I recently came across in an article about Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood. Take about 5 seconds and see what you extract from it. Then scroll down.

My guess is that you didn’t extract much. By the time you’ve read the title and figured out which colors relate to which geographic areas, your 5 seconds are up. Below is my makeover. Take another 5 seconds to review it and then scroll down.

I hope you at least got this from your 5-second review: Auburn-Gresham’s residents were much less likely to have a college degree than residents of the city/metro area in general. Here’s what I did:

  • Aggregated the groups into just two larger groups: those with and without college degrees. And I distinguished the groups with labels and colors. What makes a clustered bar chart confusing is the requirement to review multiple groups and compare the bars within each one of them.

  • Retained the subgroups but de-emphasized them so that they do not distract the viewer from the larger story. Each subgroup is represented by a shade of orange or blue and the exact percent of residents in each group is available on demand by scrolling over the bar segments.

  • Converted to a diverging bar chart to allow the viewer to more easily compare the size of the college and no-college groups.

  • Changed the title to a question to clarify what the viewer can learn from the chart.


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.

Pop Quiz: Guess What This Chart Shows

Go ahead and make a guess from the options below. Then scroll down to see how your response compares with others’ and what the answer is!

Keep scrolling!

The answer: The decline in child poverty in the U.S.


As recently reported in The New York Times, “the sharp retreat of child poverty represents major progress and has drawn surprisingly little notice, even among policy experts.” Read the article (and view the detailed line chart) to learn more about the role of government aid in lifting children and families out of poverty.

I share this chart with you—in this way—for a couple of reasons:

1) It’s an engagement strategy you can use. Rather than present a list of stats to your audience, you can engage them in your data by first quizzing them on an interesting, fun, or counterintuitive finding from your data.

2) Bad new bias. Bad news is more likely to be reported than good news, possibly because bad news sells, according to this article citing various research. Perhaps because of that bias, we may be more likely to assume a chart is telling a negative story. This chart is a reminder of the importance of taking a broader view to gain a more balanced understanding of an issue.

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 Make Your Data Riveting

Reposted from September 2019

Attention is like a bouncer at the entrance to our brains. For anything to get inside and make a difference in how we think and act, it first has to win our attention. And I don’t have to tell you (although here I go anyway) that we each have limited attention and lots of things are competing for it. So if you aim to influence others’ thoughts and actions with data, give some consideration to the nature of attention.

What wins people’s attention? 1) Stuff that stands out and 2) Stuff related to our desires or goals. The former wins our “exogenous” attention. The latter wins our “endogenous” attention.

Say you are at a crowded cocktail party. You are going to notice stuff that stands out like loud noises or bright lights. But you will also notice stuff that does not stand out but is of particular interest to you such as that woman standing in far corner whom you were hoping to see. You may also notice if one of your favorite songs is playing softly in the background.

We can make use of this understanding of attention when we visualize data by:

  • Making the most important aspects stand out.  Vary the size, color, and space around text and data points. For example, make the title much larger than the rest of the text or color all of the data points gray except for the ones you want to call attention to.

  • Pointing to aspects that may interest your intended viewers. Use titles, subtitles, data labels and captions to highlight and explain aspects of the data that may be particularly engaging for your intended audience.

Check out the before-and-after vizes below to see how I’ve applied these techniques to focus my audience’s attention.

BEFORE

AFTER

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 Reveal The People In The Data

Charts, maps, and graphs are, by nature, abstractions. And it can be easy to forget about the folks that the bars, circles, and lines represent. Plus sharing information on your clientele presents not only a visualization challenge, but also a privacy challenge since we rarely have permission to share information on all of our participants. Here’s my answer to that challenge. First, get permission from a handful of participants to share their stories. The visualization below provides an example of what we could do with that information. Each chart represents individuals with distinct shapes within groups. And scrolling over shapes colored in yellow reveals a photo and profile of an individual participant in select groups. Thus the charts convey both the aggregate story and individual stories. Try interacting with it yourself. I built this example using Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau.

And here is some more information on how to show the real people behind the data.

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.

Upcoming Free Data Viz Webinars

webinars by Amelia Kohm

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.

Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 4)

“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 I offer up another steal-worthy interactive viz that I came across in the Tableau Public Gallery.


Source: Eugenio Gallastegui on Tableau Public


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

  • Use color and labels to distinguish clusters. “Donor Score” appears to be a measure of engagement. By distinguishing groups based on their income and level of engagement, this scatterplot chart effectively shows the need for various strategies moving forward.

  • Use icons instead of dots. The chart reminds us that we are considering individual people by using human icons rather than dots on the scatterplot.

  • Provide detail on demand about individuals. The chart also lets us see the forest and the trees. If you scroll over icons, you learn more about the individuals in each group.

What I don’t think works so well on this chart is the size legend showing the age of donors and volunteers. It’s quite hard to discern the various sizes of the icons and form any ideas on the possible relationship between age and group membership.

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.

Upcoming Free Webinars

Jun 22, 2022, 8:00 am PT/11:00 am ET

Data visualization is like one of those unlikely couples. One partner is outgoing and a great storyteller. The other is introverted and sticks to the facts. To make great charts, maps, and graphs, you need to channel both partners in this odd couple: the artist and the analyst. In this workshop, I will offer up 10 key rules about composition that artists know and that analysts (and the rest of us) can apply when presenting data.

Presenter: Amelia Kohm | Data Viz for Nonprofits. Sponsor: Nonprofit Learning Lab

REGISTER for this free event.

 

July 20, 2022, 1:00 pm PT/4:00 pm ET

Almost every organization has two superpowers. The first is the data that they have packed away in databases and spreadsheets, often collecting virtual dust on their servers. The second is the visual faculties of their donors, clients, board members and staff members. While most of us glaze over at the sight of a spreadsheet, humans are wired to process visual information at lightning speed. By visualizing our data, we make it more accessible and usable.

You will leave this webinar with a clear understanding of:

  • The two superpowers organizations have and how to wield them more often and more effectively;

  • How you can use data visualization (aka data viz) to address key problems you face showing and evaluating your impact;

  • The types of visualizations that work best for different purposes; and

  • How to turn a good viz into a great one.

Presenter: Amelia Kohm | Data Viz for Nonprofits. Sponsor: techsoup

REGISTER for this free event.

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 We've Learned From All Those COVID Charts

COVID has taught us a lot about a lot of things, including data viz. Early in the pandemic, I asked: Which are worse: COVID haircuts or COVID charts? We all needed ways to understand what was happening, how bad it was, and what we should do. And many public and private entities turned to data viz to convey this information. But not all of them did a great job, particularly at the beginning. With time, those visualizing this data have learned a great deal, and we can apply this learning to charts showing all types of data.

The digital magazine, Sapiens, recently reviewed the “emerging consensus” around how to display COVID data. In this tip, I give you the 60-second version of these rules and how they might apply to the work of any nonprofit organization.

1. Cases should be reported on a population-adjusted basis. Whether you are counting cases of COVID, school drop outs, or food insecurity, raw numbers don’t mean much. One hundred drop outs in a small school district should raise more alarms than the same number in a large district. Per-capita numbers are better. They allow us to compare populations of different sizes.

2. Cases should be reported on a rolling weekly basis. Numbers of cases can fluctuate on a daily basis for a variety of reasons. And these spikes and dips can make it difficult to discern overall trends. Regardless of the type of cases you are reporting, presenting rolling averages (aka moving averages) often works better than showing daily cases.

3. Certain thresholds are meaningful and remain so over time. Per capita numbers may give us a better sense of the magnitude of a problem, but they don’t tell us what to do. The color-coded COVID risks levels serve that purpose. We can show similar thresholds in charts showing other issues. For example, the dashboard below indicates when the number of people experiencing homelessness exceeds temporary beds available and thus when further action is needed.

Source: National Alliance to End Homelessness

4. Heat maps are useful. Heat maps use color to convey meaning. And among COVID maps, as noted in the Sapiens article, “colors and threshold values vary, but everyone is speaking the same general language. Green, blue, and white tend to mean things are under control while yellow, orange, and red suggest increasing danger.” Thus heat maps show us not only when action is needed but also where it’s needed. For example, in the maps below, states with high ranks and colored in blue shades are healthier, and states with low ranks and colored in orange shades are less healthy according to the Overall Health Index and the Chronic Illness Index. Gray states are in the middle of the range. This map helps us to discern corridors of good and poor health.

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 3)

“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 I offer up another steal-worthy viz. Take a look:

Source: Nicole Mark on Tableau Public

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

  • Use a quote for the title. As noted in another data tip, titles are among the most important elements of a viz but often little effort goes into them. Nicole Mark, who created this viz, could easily have slapped on this title: “Number of People Who Fled Ukraine, February to March 2022.” Instead, Nicole humanized the crisis with a quote from Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

  • Show just the trajectory. To focus attention on the dramatic increase in the number of people fleeing Ukraine, the axes and gridlines have been removed.

  • Connect key information with color. The quote, the key statistic in the lower right corner, and the line on the chart are the only elements in red and thus appear more important than the other information and are visually related to each other.

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.

Presenting Data Fast and Slow

Sometimes we approach the challenge of sharing data with others as if we were trying to con a pet into taking a pill. We think that our audience is too busy, disinterested, or distracted to focus on the data. So we wrap it in something that attracts their attention and feed it to them as quickly as possible. The problem with this approach is that it may get the data into their brains—momentarily—but it won’t stay there long. See where the pill ends up in this video.

If we want others to LEARN from the data — which involves not only retaining it but also drawing knowledge from it and applying that knowledge in the future — then we need a different approach. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow can help us.

First a little background on how the brain works, according to the evidence Kahneman presents. For learning to happen, information first must get past System 1 of our brains. This is where fast thinking happens. System 1 is the harried gate keeper, madly processing all of the information that comes in through our senses, pitching most of it, keeping only what is deemed necessary. But getting through the gate is only half the battle. Once in, information confronts System 2. This is the part of the brain that allows for conscious thought or slow thinking. The problem is that System 2 is lazy. Conscious thought is hard, and System 2 is always looking for an excuse to avoid it. But if System 2 engages with information, the resulting knowledge can find its way to long-term memory and learning happens.

So the challenge when presenting data is to get past System 1 AND engage System 2. Let’s consider a viz from Harvard Business Review (HBR) that I think meets both parts of this challenge. Yes, it’s an example from the for-profit world, but could easily work with nonprofit data. Take a look.

How to get data past System 1

Getting data past the System 1 fast-thinking gate keeper is all about grabbing attention. We process images much more quickly than words and numbers, so images are a great foot-in-the-door. The HBR viz does it with bright colors and a cool-looking, somewhat unusual chart. There’s plenty of information out there about how to attract attention, including the use of images with:

  • Stand out colors and textures

  • Human faces (we are wired to focus on them)

  • Novelty (images that are unusual in size, placement, etc.)

Data visualizations can use color as well as images to draw attention. But getting past System 1 is not nearly enough. For learning to happen, the viz also has to engage System 2.

How to engage System 2

System 2 is smart but lazy. So we need to pique its interest. The HBR viz starts with a title that poses a question. When confronted with an interesting question, we may be more likely to stick around for an answer. Then the viz leads you through the answer in a visually engaging way (see interactive version of the viz HERE). These are two great ways to slow down and engage the brain with data. Here’s a list of ways to engage System 2:

  • Ask a question in the title as the HBR viz does—questions beg answers.

  • Make it personal. We may be more likely to engage with data when we have a personal connection with it. This New York Times viz, for example, allows you to enter in your county to see what the barriers to COVID vaccination are in your area.

  • Highlight a surprising finding. Many of us love the counterintuitive and the creative. If you draw attention to something new that the data suggests, you may have a better chance at hooking System 2. For example, this viz from The Economist shows that China emits far less greenhouse gas per person than Western countries at the same stage of economic development. Or check out this viz by Dimiter Toshkov showing that small countries can be big players in development and good governance.

  • Hand draw it. There is some evidence that making information harder to consume, for example by presenting it with harder-to-read fonts, makes the brain slow down and engage in effortful and analytic processing. Although the jury is still out on this, I do find myself more likely to engage in hand-drawn vizes like two of the winners of the World Data Visualization Prize in 2019. Perhaps it’s simply the novelty of hand-drawn charts that engages me. Anyway, it’s something you might consider, and all you need is a pen and paper.

  • Walk them through it. A great way to slow down your viewers is to set the pace by walking them through the data as HBR does in the example. I love how HBR presents what the data might look like if our assumptions were confirmed followed by what it actually looks like.

Sources: Veritasium, Visual Content Space, MIT News, Springer Link,

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 Visualize Cycles

Every organization experiences cyclical or seasonal patterns. Understanding how funding, participation, volunteering, and other factors change in predictable ways over time can help us to plan for the future. The problem is that we don’t always see these patterns. We get caught up in currents issues and crises, and it’s hard to step back and see what’s coming next. Visualizing your data can reveal cyclical or seasonal patterns in helpful ways. This often involves aggregating data from multiple years by specific time periods such as season, quarter, or day of the week. Here are some examples.

Working with a statistician named William Farr in the 1800s, Florence Nightingale analyzed mortality rates during the Crimean War. She and Farr discovered that most of the soldiers who died in the conflict perished not in combat but as a result of “preventable diseases” caused by bad hygiene. Nightingale invented the polar area chart (shown below), a variant of the pie chart, meant “to affect thro’ the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.” Each pie represented a twelve-month period of the war, with each slice showing the number of deaths per month, growing outward if the number increased, and color-coded to show the causes of death (blue: preventable, red: wounds, black: other). The New York Times showed the seasonal pattern of COVID cases using a somewhat similar chart.

Source: Wikipedia

In the dashboard below, Curtis Harris reveals not only patterns in taxi rides by time of day but also by day of the week. We can see, for example, that few people are using taxis between 2 and 3 am, particularly at the beginning of the week.

Source: Curtis Harris on Tableau Public

This varsity-level viz (below) by Lindsay Betzendahl shows the seasonality of the flu. Each dot represents one week in a particular year. Each “ray” consists of dots for the same week of different years. So the ray at the 12:00 position represents the first week in January for each year between 2007 to 2018. The size of the dots show the number of influenza cases. So we can see that cases surge during the winter weeks, in general, but we also can see outbreaks during other seasons in particular years. Betzendahl explains how to create such a chart in Tableau here.

Source: Lindsay Betzendahl 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.

How To Recognize and Reform Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are like cheap, trendy sunglasses. They may help you to look cool, briefly, but they don’t last long and do little to improve your eyesight. You’ve seen vanity metrics, even if you haven’t used this term to describe them. They are those flashy statistics (sometimes called “big ass numbers”) and charts showing how many services an organization has provided or people they’ve served or some other seemingly impressive stat. The problem is that these metrics don’t help you to better understand your current work and improve it. In this tip, I’ll give you some quick advice on recognizing and reforming vanity metrics.

How To Recognize A Vanity Metric

This Tableau article suggests three questions to ask to identify a vanity metric. I’ve put a nonprofit spin on each:

  • What decision can we make with the metric? If the metric can’t help you to make a decision, it’s probably a vanity metric. For example, does knowing how many meals you delivered help you to decide who, what, where, when, or how to deliver meals in the future? Or do you need a more specific metric such as the gap between need and service provision for various subgroups of clients?

  • What can we do to intentionally reproduce the result? Did some random event produce the big number? For example, did you see a bump in the number of participants last year because another organization, providing a similar service, closed down? If you cannot consistently reproduce the same result next year, this isn’t a helpful metric.

  • Is the data a real reflection of the truth? Let’s face it. There are always ways to misrepresent the truth. You can tell the world that attendance at all of your programs last year totaled 3,237. Sounds good, but that’s probably a “duplicated number” and can be misleading depending on what you want to understand or broadcast to the world. Some people likely attended more than one program. So the total number of individuals who participated in any program could be much lower. The central question to ask yourself when considering a metric is whether or not it will help your organization achieve its goals. If your goal is to reach more folks, this metric is not helpful.

How To Reform A Vanity Metric

  • Provide context. The metrics that are worthy of your attention and your stakeholders’ attention are those that are directly related to your goals. You may have overall goals for all of your participants, clients, audiences, services, programs, etc. But you also might have specific goals for subsets of those groups and for specific time periods. Present your metrics in relation to the goals. And compare metrics for subgroups to each other to see where you are making progress and where you are not.

  • Use more than one statistic. Sometimes what you want to improve cannot be measured with just one metric. For example, if you aim to improve the diversity of your staff, you may want to look at a set of metrics together including number, tenure, and seniority of staff by race/ethnicity, gender identification, age, etc.

Sources: Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics, Stanford Social Innovation Review and Vanity Metrics: Definition, How To Identify Them, And Examples, Tableau.

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 Make Big Numbers Tangible

We’ve talked about the problem with big numbers before. Most recently, we considered the difficulty humans have digesting large numbers and how “perspectives” — simple sentences that relate a large number to something more familiar to us — can help us to understand, assess, and recall numbers. (For more on this, check out the data tip.)

I’m returning to the big number problem today and offering up some new tips for dealing with them. The inspiration for these tips came from the data-driven documentaries of Neil Halloran, specifically his first documentary called The Fallen of World War II. If you have a few more minutes to spare after reading this 60-second tip (and are not among the 13 million + who have viewed it already), I highly recommend that you check it out. It’s 18 minutes long, but the techniques listed below all appear in the first 7 minutes.

Halloran uses the following techniques to make larger numbers understandable. And you don’t need to be a filmmaker to use them. You can apply them to simple data presentations on websites, reports, and PowerPoints.

  1. Use shapes or icons (rather than bars) to represent one or more people, programs, etc. Halloran uses a human figure shape to represent 1,000 people.

  2. Show an aggregate and then break it down by subgroups and time periods. Halloran shows aggregates, such as the total number of U.S. soldiers who died and then, using animation, redistributes the human figures to show how many soldiers died in the European and Pacific theaters and then how many died over time. The animation is cool but not necessary. You can do the same thing with a series of static images. See example below.

  3. Juxtapose photos and charts. To keep the discussion from becoming too abstract, Halloran reminds the audience what actual soldiers (rather than icons) look like by incorporating photos into his presentation. Again, animation is not necessary. Static photos can be placed along side charts.

  4. Walk audience through the data. To give the audience a sense of scale, the video progresses from smaller to larger numbers. Halloran first walks us through casualty stats for the U.S. and European countries. These numbers seem quite high so by the time Russian stats are shown, we are blown away.

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 Improve Your Organization’s Time Line

Here’s a simple data viz idea. Next time you make a time line showing your organization’s milestones, size those milestone markers (usually circles) according to some key measure. Voila! You are not only showing what happened but also your progress along the way.

The data for such a viz is super simple. Something like this:

Screen Shot 2021-08-24 at 9.01.48 AM.png

I connected the data shown above to Tableau Public (the free version of Tableau) to create the time line below. Vertical time lines not only suggest an upward progression but also work better on phone screens.

Dashboard 1 (3) (1).png

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 Make Data Dashboards More Comfortable

I’m always looking for ways to make data more comfortable, particularly for non-data people. Sometimes that means creating simple charts that everyone can understand. Sometimes that means limiting the number of charts presented. And today, I offer up another tip: show your data in a familiar environment. For many of us, paper, file folders, paper clips, and post-it notes are familiar and, dare I say, even comforting.

Give this old-school-meets-new-school data dashboard a spin and see what you think. It shows real-time data in an interactive format. And if you’d like some help creating a similar dashboard for your organization, feel free to contact me.

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

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 Urban 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 graph 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, Urban’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.

How To Present Diversity Data (or What To Steal From This Diversity Scorecard)

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.

Interesting Versus Actionable Data

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It’s easy to get lost in a sea of interesting data when what you really need is actionable data. As Oracle’s Nate Mayfield points out, you know when you’ve presented only interesting data when you get this type of response: “Oh, cool. Yeah, that's great to know.” On the other hand, if you hear “Oh, okay. I can definitely decide what to do now,” then you’ve presented actionable data.

The key to presenting actionable data is to ask specific—rather than broad—questions. And then design your charts, maps, and graphs to answer those narrower questions. Mayfield’s article focuses on the types of questions a business might ask. Let’s consider the types of questions a nonprofit might ask:

Interesting Questions.png

Mayfield notes that data dashboards that are designed for a wide range of users tend to address only interesting questions. “Because they are intended for a broad set of users, with a lot of filters, you can in theory answer a lot of questions with these sprawling dashboards,” says Mayfield. “The problem is people quickly get lost in them and don’t spend the time required to answer their questions.” Instead, Mayfield advises us to create simple dashboards that answer quite specific questions such as the actionable questions above. So consider a series of simple dashboards, each designed to provide answers that prompt action for a particular type of user.

To see past data tips, including tips on other types of pantry staple data, 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 Showcase Your Sites With An Interactive Map

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Here’s a viz you can use. It is interactive, can be built in Tableau Public for free, and can be embedded in your website. This example shows affordable housing sites. Give it a try below and check out these features:

  • The circles on the map show the location of the sites. The color of the circles show the type of site, and the size of the circles indicates number of units (but you can size your circles by any measure such as number of people served or programs offered.)

  • Click on a site on the map to see more information, to the right, about the site including a photo.

  • When you click on a site, it is also highlighted on the chart below so you can compare that site to the others.

To learn how to create an interactive map with similar features in Tableau Public, check out this tutorial. I’d also be happy to build one for you, customized to your needs. Just click “Schedule A Free Consultation” 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 Show Your Progress With Color Alone

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"Color is a power which directly influences the soul." -Wassily Kandinsky

It’s August, so it seems appropriate to talk about heat maps. I’ve blogged about this simple yet powerful chart type before. It takes advantage of the power of color like no other chart I know. Heat maps use variations in color to show differences among categories (e.g. people living in different zip codes) or differences across a scale (e.g. people with different income levels). In a lot of cases, it’s simply a table with color added to the cells.

The enormous potential of a heat map is clear in Philip Bump’s recent heat map in The Washington Post, which took its inspiration from Thomas Wood’s similar chart. As Bump notes, this chart is “elegantly simple.” The rows are states, grouped by region. The columns are presidential election years. And shades of red and blue indicate the parties of candidates who won in each state, with darker shades indicating wider margins. Here’s part of the chart:

Source: The Washington Post, August 24, 2021

Source: The Washington Post, August 24, 2021

By carefully grouping the states into regions and subregions, the chart reveals interesting patterns: shifts from blue to red (and vice versa) as well as shifts from greater to lesser margins (and vice versa).

Think about how you can show change over time in the problems you are addressing or the services you are offering using color and strategic groupings. Here are some possible applications for organizations like yours:

  • Show shifts in service use over time among two (or more) groups such as adults represented by one color and children represented by another. Each row might be a zip code area and rows could be grouped by city.

  • Show changes in pollution over time produced by two (or more) sources such as vehicles represented by one color and factories by another. Each row might be a country and rows could be grouped by continent.

  • Show variation in client make up over time among two (or more) groups such as higher income groups represented by one color and lower income groups by another. Each row might be a program site and rows could be grouped by neighborhood.

You can create heat maps in many data viz programs. Here is how to create them in Excel and in Tableau.

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.