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.

Let’s Talk!

Thanks for subscribing to 60-Second Data Tips. I hope you are finding the tips useful. I’m writing to offer you some more of my time. Click below to schedule a free consultation about your data. Let’s talk about how you can extract meaning from your data with great charts, maps, and graphs, share them with others, and use them to improve your work.

-Amelia (pictured above drowning in data . . . I feel your pain)

Why You Should Know About Connected Dot Plots

This week, I give you the connected dot plot. The name might not ring a bell, but I think you’ll recognize the face. It’s a pretty intuitive and useful chart for nonprofits. This is a continuation of a series of tips which introduce you to different chart types which are good for making sense of the type of data nonprofits collect.

Active Ingredients (What is a connected dot plot?)

A connected dot plot, aka “dumbbell plot,” shows the differences between two categories or two points in time. Usually circles indicate the values of each category or time period. For example, this segment of a larger chart from Pew Research Center gives us an intuitive way of comparing two age groups on their social media use. We can easily see where the gap is larger (Germany) and smaller (India). The stats to the right help to distinguish lines that are close in length such as the ones for Germany and France. Here are instructions for creating a connected dot plot with Tableau and Excel.

Uses

Connected dot plots can be much more effective in showing differences or changes over time than their more popular cousin: the grouped bar chart. Check out the two examples below which show the average score (on a five point scale) among respondents to a survey in 2018 and 2019. See which gives you a better sense of the change over time.

Grouped Bar Chart

Screen Shot 2021-08-16 at 11.35.55 AM.png

Connected Dot Plot

Warnings

In the examples above, the relative positions of the two categories or time points are the same in all cases: social media use was always greater in the younger group of users than in the older group, and the average score was always higher in 2019 than in 2018. What should you do when the positions flip flop? A good strategy is to call out these direction changes using arrows, colors, and/or legends as in this chart:


Fun Facts

Connected dot plots are sometimes called “Cleveland dot plots,” named for William Cleveland who, along with Robert McGill, studied different types of “encodings” in charts such as the length of a line, the area of a “slice” of a circle, and the position of a point along a common scale. They looked at what types of encodings humans decode most easily and, based on their findings, they designed a chart well-suited for human perception: the connected or “Cleveland” dot plot.

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

Sources: Storytelling With Data and UC Business Analytics R Programming Guide

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 You Should Know About Sunburst Charts

This is a new addition to a series of tips on different chart types. In each tip, l give you need-to-know information in a format akin to the “Drug Facts” on the back of medication boxes: active ingredients (what the chart is), uses (when to use it), and warnings (what to look out for when creating the chart). The idea is to fill up your toolbox with a variety of tools for making sense of data. This time I give you the sunburst chart.

Active Ingredients (What is a sunburst chart?)

A sunburst chart is a multi-level pie chart. Each ring corresponds to a level in a hierarchy, with the highest level as the inner circle or ring. Each ring slice is either divided equally under its parent slice or is proportional to a value. Color is often used to highlight hierarchal categories. Check out the example below. The inner ring segments show the number of participants in three program areas of a community center. The outer ring segments shows the number of participants in specific programs within the three areas. Scroll over segments to learn more.

Uses

Although the pie chart gets a bad rap in the data viz world, this pie chart cousin shines in certain circumstances. It works best (in my opinion) when you want to show not only a hierarchy but also how each component of the hierarchy differs according to some measure. For example, you want to show which components have the most participants or funding, or the highest survey ratings.

Here are instructions for creating a sunburst chart with Tableau and Excel.

Warnings

Sunburst charts with a large number of ring slices are difficult to read. A good rule of thumb is to abandon your dreams of a sunburst chart if any of the segment slices are too small to label. Once you need a color legend, as in the example below, use another type of chart such as a tree diagram or treemap. Also, I think a tree diagram works better when you are just showing a hierarchy and not how the components differ according to a measure.

Source: Oracle

Fun Fact

Here’s an early example of a sunburst chart, published in Mechanical Engineering in 1921 according to Think Design. It shows the average annual net expenditure of the US federal government from 1910 to 1919.

Source: Think Design

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 Nail Your Next Presentation (And Every One After That)

Hey Everyone: This week’s quick tip is to check out Ann Emery’s upcoming course on creating powerful presentations. This course includes both live and recorded lessons, so it only opens once a year for registration, and the deadline is Friday, April 29.

This course will transform you into the powerful presenter that your organization needs. Here's what's included to make that happen.

  • 80+ video lessons that you can watch anytime (the equivalent of my two-day Powerful Presentations workshop)

  • Step-by-step process to deliver data-driven presentations that engage audiences

  • Your Turn activities after every lesson to post your own work and get the instructor's feedback

  • 12 additional Live Trainings just for participants in this cohort

  • Office Hours sessions (almost) every week in 2022

  • Powerful Presentations ebook with our checklists and case studies

  • Private Data Vizards community of fellow participants

  • Weekly emails to cheer you on

  • Lifetime access so you don't feel rushed

  • Examples from a variety of industries (public health, juvenile justice, museums, and more)

  • Behind-the-scenes PowerPoint magic tricks guaranteed to make your jaw drop

LEARN MORE AND ENROLL 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.

A Better Alternative to Surveys?

When organizations want to understand the concerns, opinions, beliefs, or needs of their communities, clientele, or participants, they often turn to surveys. But I probably don’t have to tell you that surveys have many downsides. To name just a few:

  • The difficulty of asking the right questions in the right ways to really understand issues accurately and fully.

  • The difficulty of getting a decent response rate so that you can feel at least somewhat confident that responders’ viewpoints reflect those of the larger group.

  • The difficulty of extracting actionable knowledge from survey responses without a degree in data analysis.

I recently read about a tool that addresses some of the downsides of surveys. Polis is an open-source, real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words.

Surveys present people with questions like this:

Source: https://www.examples.com/business/assessment/community-needs-assessment.html

By contrast, Polis allows participants to submit their own short comments on a topic specified by the “conversation” creator. Comments are then sent out semi-randomly to other participants to vote on by clicking agree, disagree or pass.

Most interesting to me are the visualizations that Polis generates in a report, which can be shared with all participants. The report includes, a viz like this:

Source: Polis

Each dot represents a comment or statement and is placed along a continuum to show the degree of agreement with the statement. In this conversation, you can see that there were many more consensus statements than divisive statements. And Polis says that’s usually the case. Polis can make consensus visible and thus may be a powerful tool when division so dominates our attention that we may be skeptical that any consensus among diverse groups exists.

When you scroll over a dot, the related statement appears below with stacked bar charts showing the amount of agreement (green), disagreement (red) and passes (gray) among participants overall and by opinion groups. An opinion group is made up of participants who tended to vote similarly on multiple statements and also have voted distinctly differently from other groups. Because the statement shown above (represented by the red dot in the chart) is toward the consensus end of the spectrum, the majority of participants in both opinion groups A and B agreed with the statement. That wasn’t the case for the statement shown below. Participants in opinion group A were much more likely to agree with this statement than those in opinion group B.

Source: Polis

The report also includes a summary of all of the consensus statements. (See example below.)

I can’t vouch for Polis — never used it myself — but I find its basic idea intriguing. If your organization is looking for a better way to understand a large group of people and is particularly interested in finding consensus hidden among all the noisy division, you may want to look into it.

Source: Polis

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 To Do With Incomplete Data

Reposted from March 29, 2021

Here’s the super short version of this data tip: when designing data viz, don’t mix complete and incomplete data. Below is the somewhat-longer-but-still-60-seconds version of this data tip.

The graphs below were on the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) website and show the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases associated with CPS buildings. I’ve added the pink lines and captions to direct your attention to the last two data points. The first image shows what the graph looked like on Monday, January 18, 2021 and the second image shows what the graph looked like 5 days later on Saturday, January 23rd.

If you went to this website on January 18th and looked that this graph, you might very well have concluded that cases had recently plummeted. But you’d be wrong. To understand what was really going on, you’d have to notice that the last data point (1/23) was in the future and put that information together with a caption saying “Case counts are updated Monday through Friday (excluding holidays) after impacted individuals are notified.” So the graph shows complete data for past weeks but incomplete data for the current week. The last data point shows week-to-date data.

Unless your aim is to confuse or deceive, why present data in this way? Instead, when you have complete data for various time periods or groups and incomplete data for other time periods or groups, consider the following:

  • If you are updating data on a daily basis, then show day intervals (rather than week intervals as in the graphs above) on the X-axis.

  • Create a separate chart showing a running total for the incomplete time period or group and place it alongside the graph showing complete data.

  • If neither of the solutions above work for you, at least color the dots, lines, or other marks representing the incomplete data in a color different from the complete data to alert the viewer to the difference and include a color legend to explain the difference.

Thanks to Carol White of CBWhite marketing research and strategy consulting for pointing out this graph to me! 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 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.

Why You Should Know About Span Charts

Tired of bar and pie charts but not sure what your other options may be? Meet the simple and friendly span chart.

This is a new addition to a series of tips on different chart types. In each tip, l give you need-to-know information in a format akin to the “Drug Facts” on the back of medication boxes: active ingredients (what the chart is), uses (when to use it), and warnings (what to look out for when creating the chart). The idea is to fill up your toolbox with a variety of tools for making sense of data. And the span chart is a simple tool you can put to good use!

Active Ingredients (What is a span chart?)

A span chart shows the range between a minimum value and a maximum value. Check out the example below which displays the salaries of full-time employees of the City of Chicago in various departments. The chart on top shows the range between the lowest and highest salaries in each department, and when you click on a bar, the chart below shows the salaries of individual employees in that department (which you can see by scrolling over the circles). So we can see, for example, that although the public library department has a wide range of salaries, the large majority of employees earn less than $100K per year.

Uses

Span charts provide the extreme values. So if you want your viewer to appreciate the range of values and compare the range of different subgroups, as the example above does, it can be quite effective. In addition to salary ranges, a nonprofit organization might use a span chart to show the range between:

  1. The largest and smallest donation amounts per person by year or by subgroup.

  2. The highest and lowest grade point average of students in a tutoring program by semester or by subgroup.

  3. The most and least days of participation among adults in a job training program by month or by subgroup.

Here are instructions for creating a span chart with Tableau and Excel.

Warnings

Span charts do not show the values in between the minimum and maximum or the average value. So you have no sense of the distribution of data points. Are the values evenly distributed or are most at the high or low end? If understanding the distribution is important, you can pair a span chart with a chart that provides more information on the in-between values, as the example above does. Other chart types which show distribution include: histograms, scatter charts, and box plots.

Fun Fact

Span charts go by a variety of names including range bar/column graph, floating bar graph, difference graph, and high-low graph.

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

Sources: The Data Visualisation Catalogue

Let’s talk about YOUR data!

Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.

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.

10 Essential Data Facts For Non-Data People: The Cheat Sheet

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.

10 Essential Data Facts For Non-Data People (Fact #10)

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.