Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 9)

Source: Source: Yusuke Nakanishi on Tableau Public

Here’s another steal-worthy viz to inspire you. This one is from Yusuke Nakanishi on Tableau Public. Filling the numbers to show the percent is cool, particularly because the chart is about drinking and the numbers appear to be filled like a glass. Nakanishi created the chart in Tableau by making a simple bar chart and then placing a virtual stencil (i.e. numbers with a transparent fill) over the chart. The best place to make this type of stencil is probably Adobe Illustrator. But if you don’t have an Adobe subscription, you can do it for free in Canva. I created this image in Canva as indicated below.

1. Open Canva and click on “Create a design” in upper right corner of the screen. Select a size (I chose presentation).

2. Select “Background” on left side of screen and then choose a background.

3. Select “Elements” on left side of screen and enter' “number frames” in the search window. Number frames look like numbers filled with an illustration of grass and sky. Click on the numbers you want and place and size them on the slide as you wish.

4. Select “Elements” on left side of screen and enter search terms in the search window to find a photo with one color on the bottom and another color on the top. I entered “oil” and used a photo with oil on the bottom and white on the top.

5. Drag that image over each number frame until it fills the frame.

6. Double click on the filled number and resize and move the image until the bottom color fills the number frame to the right height. To determine the height, you can use Canva’s rulers and guides.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Do nonprofits have the necessary data to make good use of AI?

This is a question that I’ve been wondering about. Maybe you have too? So I used AI (artificial intelligence) to find an answer! Here is what ChatGPT spit out in a few seconds with my commentary on the side.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Jitter Your Charts

A jittered bar chart shows the individuals that make up the bar. In this example, each circle represents an employee within a given city department. Larger circles represent higher salaries and smaller circles lower salaries. You can scroll over each circle to learn more. It’s another great way to show the individuals within an aggregate. And it’s easy to create in Tableau (just watch this four-minute video) or in Excel (here are instructions).

Data Source: Chicago Data Portal (Current Employee Names, Salaries, and Position Titles, 2023)

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Is The Chihuahua Syndrome Infecting Your Data?

This “sketchplanation” gives a name to a familiar problem.* Chihuahua is challenging to spell. If humans are entering dog breeds into a database or spreadsheet, chances are there are going to be spelling errors unless they can select from a list of breeds or there is another sort of data validation. It’s hard to extract meaning from data that is inaccurate. “Capitals, spaces, misspellings, hyphens, numbers stored as text, numbers entered as letters (I, O), accents, straight/curly apostrophes, dates out of order, languages, dialects, abbreviations, and more are all routes for misleading your analysis.” So make a plan to clean your dirty data and to keep it clean over time. Also, when visualizing data in programs like Tableau, you can group common misspellings into one new field. In this way, the misspelled entry will be automatically corrected in visualizations that use the new field. Also, Tableau Prep Builder comes with most subscriptions to Tableau and allows for easier data preparation including combining, shaping, and cleaning data for analysis within Tableau.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

*Chihuahua Syndrome” was coined by Edward Tufte.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Two Ways to Offer The "Just Right" Data Portion

Reposted from June 2018

Pretend that you are Goldilocks and your porridge is data. How much data is just right? Just enough to engage your funders, staff, or board members, but not so much as to be overwhelming?

To answer this question, we might consider Miller’s Law. George A. Miller was a psychology professor at Princeton University and wrote one of the most frequently cited papers in psychology: "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information."

Miller conducted experiments on human memory and concluded that the number of objects that an average human can remember in the short-term is 7 ± 2.  Objects can include symbols like numbers or abstract concepts. We also can hold several groups of related objects in mind.

Armed with this knowledge, we can make visualizations of data (charts, maps, graphs) easier to digest by:

1) Grouping data into categories. Whenever you have a graph or chart with more than 5 data categories, the individual units start to lose their individuality and are perceived by our eyes as a single whole. In the “before” and “after” examples below, the after chart is easier to process because it combines data on donors into just two groups: those in Chicago and those in other cities.

2) Highlight one or two single categories and gray out the rest. The second chart below (called a parallel coordinates chart) includes a line for each of the 50 states showing the prevalence of various diseases in each state. But only one state (Hawaii) is highlighted and the rest are grayed out. Thus there are really only two data categories to compare: 1) Hawaii and 2) the rest of the states.

BEFORE: TOO MANY GROUPS

AFTER: JUST TWO GROUPS

HIGHLIGHT ONE GROUP

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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10 Tips for Presenting Data Like An Artist

Resposted from March 2021

To make great charts, maps, and graphs, you need to channel both your inner analyst and your inner artist. Here are 10 rules about composition that artists know and that analysts (and the rest of us) can apply when presenting data. Bookmark it! Print it out and pin it to your bulletin board!

[Original size] Data Viz Composition Rules by Amelia Kohm

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Context is King

This “sketchplanation” elegantly demonstrates the importance of context in understanding anything. Since data visualizations are supposed to help people understand something, we should pay close attention to context when creating them, adding as much context as is needed for others to appreciate what’s going on and act on it. Considering the following charts . . .

Low-context chart

This is your garden variety chart. I see them all the time. Sure, it provides some context by comparing clients served in different zip code areas. But it doesn’t give me enough context to understand if these numbers are high, low, or somewhere in between. This chart needs more context.

xx

Moderate-context chart

This chart is better than the one above. By providing the previous year’s numbers, we can see where there has been increases and decreases and how large and small they were as well as compare the number increases (3) to the number of decreases (1).

xx

Moderate-context chart

This chart, too, allows for better assessment of the numbers than the first chart did. By simply adding a reference line for the goal, we have a better understanding of what’s going on and where we might need to take action. A reference line showing the average number of clients per zip code might also be helpful.

xx

High-context chart

This “small multiples chart”* gives us much more context by showing how the current numbers compare to past years. Consider, for example, the trend for 60601. Just knowing the current and past years’ numbers would not give you an appreciation of the overall upward trend.

*Small multiples chart: a series of similar graphs or charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to be easily compared

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Interesting Versus Actionable Data

Reposted from October 2021

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:

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.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 8)

Today I offer up yet another steal-worthy viz. The Racial Wealth Gap viz uses data from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances to show the proportion of households that own different kinds of assets by racial group. Here’s what I like about this chart (and what you should steal from it):

1. The use 100 families in addition to percentages. We can wrap our brains around 100 families. We can imagine it.

2. The use of icons that help tell the story and also remind us of Monopoly pieces.

3. Highlighting the gaps between the White group and other racial groups. The pink squares help us to appreciate how large the gaps are and how they compare across different asset groups.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

Source: The Visual Capitalist

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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What Averages Obscure

Reposted from January 2018

Nonprofits (and everyone else) are addicted to averages. We like to talk about how participants do on average. We might describe how many visitors we have in an average week. But how much are we missing when we focus solely on averages? Short answer: it depends, but it could be a lot. If I only showed you the average sized person in the picture above, would you appreciate the full range of sizes?

Image: Sketchplanations

To figure out what and how much we are missing, we need to calculate—or better yet show—how spread out our data points are. Understanding the spread gives us an idea of how well the average represents the data. When the spread of values in the data set is large, the average obscures the real picture more than when the spread is small.

Spread measures include range, quartiles, absolute deviation, variance and standard deviation. For more on these measures, check this out. 

A great way to quickly grasp the spread of your data is to make a box plot. A box plot (aka. box and whisker diagram) shows the distribution of data including the minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile, and maximum. The box plots below show the affordability of neighborhoods in five cities. Each red circle represents a zip code area. The gray boxes show where 50 percent of the zip code areas fall on the affordability scale. And the median (the middle point in a dataset) is where the dark gray meets the light gray. You can see that, in general (i.e according to the median), New York is more affordable than Los Angeles. However, New York has some zip code areas that are much less affordable than the median seems to suggest.

So when looking at your data, don’t just look at averages, also consider the spread.

Image created by Moxilla for Noun Project.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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And Here's A Bonus: A Bar Chart Catalogue

I thought I had wrapped up my miniseries on bar charts when I came across this excellent bar chart catalogue by Rosa Mariana de Leon-E. It includes 27 variations on the bar chart with links to instructions for creating them with Tableau. Enjoy!

Source: Rosa Mariana de Leon-E on Tableau Public

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #8: Double Duty Stacked Bars

This week I offer up my last bar chart hack. I came across this hack just recently in Philip Bump’s excellent Washington Post newsletter, How To Read This Chart. In the newsletter, he shares a chart from his book: The Aftermath: The Last Days of The Baby Boom and The Future of Power in America. The chart, shown below, is a sort of double-duty stacked bar chart. It not only makes use of the length of the bar segments to convey meaning, it also makes use of the width of the bars.

Here’s how Bump describes the chart: “The width of each column reflects the total percentage of the population for that generational group. The colored sections are the percentage that is each racial group. Black, Asian and Hispanic Americans of every age vote more heavily Democratic than Republican. It’s not just White young people who are more Democratic (though, among women, that is the case.) It’s that young people are less likely to be White and also more likely to vote against Republicans. The thesis of my book is that the baby boom (which backed Donald Trump by 3 points in 2020) is seeing its political and economic power fade, contributing to a number of the tensions we see in the moment. Between 2016 and 2020, the percentage of the presidential electorate that was baby-boom-aged or older went from 52 to 44 percent; the percent that was millennial or Gen Z went from 23 to 30 percent.”

Had Bump shown the percent of the population in different racial groups in one chart and the percent of the population in different generations in another chart, he would have provided fewer insights.

I encourage you to explore your data with this type of chart, showing the percent of your participants, donors, locations, etc. according to two different dimensions such as age group and zip code or giving level and giving history (recurring, one-time, major gift). It might yield important insights and help you to communicate them to others.

Source: The Aftermath by Philip Bump

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #7: The Lollipop Chart

Reposted from February 2019

The lollipop chart provides a short and sweet addition to the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.”

A lollipop chart is nothing more than thin bars with circles on top. So why go to the trouble? Well, if you have a lot of bars of similar length, you should not go to the trouble. The circles will just make comparing the lengths of the bars more difficult.

But the lollipop chart can be helpful when you have a bunch of bars of varying lengths, and you want to set them apart in a visually interesting way. Also, you can use those circles as labels, as in the example above.

Check out these easy instructions for making lollipop charts in Tableau and Excel.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

Icons created by Ben Davis, Dinosoft Labs, and andrewcaliber from Noun Project.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #6: The Funnel Chart

Reposted from February 2019

Today we arrive at Episode 6 of the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” As we have discussed, bar charts are user-friendly and familiar, but familiarity can breed contempt. So this week we consider yet another variation of the bar chart called the funnel chart.

The funnel chart is used to visualize a process and how the amount of something decreases as it progresses from one phase to another. You might think of it as a pipeline.

The example below shows the decreasing number of participants at each stage of a food service training program. We can see that few of those who attend orientation make it all the way to a job. And we can see where there is the most/least drop off. This funnel is also interactive. You can see the funnels for particularly subgroups by changing the filter at the top.

It looks cool and makes intuitive sense, but a funnel chart is just a bar chart on its side with a mirror image. Check out these easy instructions for making funnel charts in Tableau and Excel.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #5: A Little Fine-Tuning Can Transform A Chart

Welcome back to the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” This week we look at some graphical fine-tuning that can transform a traditional bar chart into something that’s more engaging and more informative.

First I’ll show. Then I’ll tell.

Take a look at Chart A below. Then take a look at Chart B.

Chart A

Chart B

Both are bar charts showing the same data. But B wins, hands down. Why?

Chart A truncates the Y-axis making the difference between large and small counties look bigger than it actually is. Chart B, by contrast, fills in the whole bar and darkens the portion not attending school or employed, thus giving us a sense of the size of both groups (those who are in and out of school and work) in large and small counties.

Chart B points us to the main takeaway with the title and annotations.

Chart B doesn’t have unnecessary and distracting visual elements such as gridlines and axes labels.

Chart B provides images to further emphasize the contrast between large and small counties.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #4: Radial Charts

Reposted from February 2019

Welcome to Episode 3 of “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” This time we consider two bar chart subspecies that recast the regular bar chart in circular form. They may be eye-catching but be careful how you use them.

Radial Column Chart: (aka Circular Column Graph or Star Graph). As you can see in the example above, the bars on this chart are plotted on a grid of concentric circles, each representing a value on a scale. Usually, the inner circles represent lower values and values increase as you move outward. Sometimes each bar is further divided using color to show subgroups within each category. Because we are better at assessing length along a common scale, this type of chart isn’t ideal if you want viewers to accurately compare the lengths of each bar. However, these charts are great at showing cyclical patterns. Florence Nightingale used this type of chart (which she called a “polar area chart”) to show a cyclical pattern in the number and causes of death in the Crimean War.

View fullsize

This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.

Radial Bar Chart (aka Circular Bar Chart) is simply a bar chart in which the bars curve around a circle, like runners on a circular track. As you may recall, races on circular or oval running tracks include staggered starting lines so that runners on the outer (longer) tracks run the same distance as those on the inner (shorter) tracks. But the bars on a radial chart have the same starting line making it difficult to compare lengths. So skip the radial bar chart. Not worth the effort.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Data Viz Resources You Should Know: Visual Capitalist

Here’s a new addition to my highly-curated resources list: Visual Capitalist. I occasionally write a 60-second data tip describing a particular resource, including why I think it’s cool. And I link each of these tips to a resources list on my website.

What is it?

Visual Capitalist is an on-line publisher of data visualizations. Their aim is to make the world’s data more discoverable. As the name suggests, the visualizations primarily focus on markets, technology, energy, and the global economy but also on education, healthcare, and the environment using public sources of data including government entities (i.e. U.S. Census data, FRED, etc.), intergovernmental organizations (IMF, World Bank, etc.), or established thought leaders in their respective sectors (think tanks, non-profits, corporations).

Who’s it for?

Anyone who wants to understand or show information on markets, technology. energy, healthcare, education or the global economy. They allow much of their original visual content to be used by others. In many use cases, this can be done for free. (See more info on using their content.)

Who’s behind it?

Visual Capitalist is independently owned, with its founder, Jeff Desjardins, as a majority shareholder.

Why I think it’s cool

Their visualizations can be quite engaging with high production values. You can share them on social media for free. Sign up for a free subscription on any page of their website to get one in your email box each day.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #3: The Combo Chart

Reposted from January 2019

Welcome to another episode in the 60-Second Data Tip series, “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” As we have discussed, bar charts are user-friendly and familiar, but like all things familiar, they can be boring and easy-to-ignore. This week we consider—in about 30 seconds— how to combine a bar chart with another type of chart to wake us up and engage us.

Consider the two charts below. Both show the same data: fundraising goals vs. actual funds raised. The one on top uses bars for both categories. The bottom one uses bars for the goals and lines for actual amounts.

Which works better? I vote for the bottom one. It makes comparing values between two different categories easier because it uses not only different colors to distinguish them but different “encodings” (bars and lines).  The bottom chart gives us a clear view of when we are exceeding or falling short of our goals in any given month.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #2: The Icon Bar Chart

Reposted from January 2019

Welcome to Episode 2 of “How to Hack a Bar Chart.” This mini-series shows you how to take something that works well and that folks understand and move it in a more creative and engaging direction. This time, you meet a close cousin of the bar chart, but this cousin is more interesting than its relative. It has icons.

This is what you should NOT do with icons: make them into bars. Here’s why: bar charts are powerful (if boring) because we can easily compare their lengths. When icons or images are used in place of bars, such comparisons are more difficult to make. See the first example below showing how many clients live in different types of homes. It’s quite a challenge to determine how many more clients live in suburban homes vs. high rises. That’s because the height of the icons are difficult to assess.

The second example makes it a little easier. But I’d argue that in both examples 1 and 2, the icons make the viewer’s job (comparing lengths) unnecessarily difficult.

The third example, introduces bars back into the bar chart and thus requires minimal viewer effort.

And the fourth further lightens the load by removing the Y-axis and directly labeling the bars and placing the bars closer together.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

Image credits: House by ANTON icon from the Noun Project, company by Angriawan Ditya Zulkarnain from the Noun Project, Farm by Ferran Brown from the Noun Project

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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Bar Chart Hack #1: The Divergent Stacked Bar Chart

Reposted from January 2019

Last week I promised to arm you with useful bar chart hacks. The idea is to take something that works well and that folks understand but move it in a more creative and interesting direction.

So this week I give to you: The Divergent Stacked Bar Chart.

Okay, so you know what a bar chart is. And you probably know what a stacked bar chart is, even if you don’t call it that. It uses color to show the subgroups that comprise each bar (or larger group) in the chart like this:

Regular Stacked Bar Chart

Now the cool, or divergent, part. It’s easier to show you than to describe it. So take a look:

Divergent Stacked Bar Chart

As you can see, the the divergent chart aligns each bar around a common midpoint. So it’s much easier to compare, for example, positive and negative values across categories.

Stephanie Evergreen provides directions on making a divergent stacked bar chart in Excel. And here are instructions on creating such a chart in Tableau. Other data viz softwares can make this chart too.

For a much deeper dive into the data viz world’s debate over when and if to use divergent stacked bar charts, check out this article by Daniel Zvinca.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

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Let’s talk about YOUR data!

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

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