Integrating data visualization into non-profit work is both a strategic advantage and an easy pitfall.
The core of non-profit work, for me, is communication. Listening to people in need, sharing their stories with the public, and coordinating change come back to how well an organization informs itself and others. The impact communication can have feels timeless, but how people connect is not. The growth of data, as well as social media, has impacted public relations. Earlier decades may have had less requirement for data in non-profit communications. In an age dominated by TED talks and tech pitch decks, sharing information memorably seems to be the norm. Which raises a question: how can a non-profit organization use information memorably?
Data visualization is an excellent tool to answer this because it’s the act of communicating information through image effectively. The proliferation of data visualization into everyday life indicates tables, charts, and icons have been widely adopted. Yet, being aware of data visualization as a practice and even attempting it, will not fully help a non-profit organization to use information memorably. Those non-profit organizations who use information memorably likely integrated data visualization into all their methods of communication.
In this article, we explore how The DeBruce Foundation integrated data visualization—research & reporting, social media, public tools, and internal reporting. You can even see this in our free upcoming research event set for November 19, 2024. We hope you will feel empowered to attempt an integration similar to the points outlined below. The first step in your journey may seem indirect. Before applying these practices, consider growing your data literacy, listening to your team’s needs, and solving pain points. As you remove obstacles to data visualization and build comfort with it, you will increase the ability to integrate these practices with your organization.
Research and reporting
Focus on narrative to avoid vague or confusing designs.
The DeBruce Foundation is dedicated to expanding pathways to economic growth and opportunity. Our dedication takes the form of helping individuals unlock their career potential through self-exploration with several free resources and training. Supporting our work are a series of reports and research on how individuals build careers. We even have a nationally representative longitudinal trend survey on the subjects of employment, income, and work conditions going back to 2020.
Not every non-profit organization is going to have research looking over thousands of interactions on a subject. However, almost all non-profit organizations will generate some form of thought leadership on their impact and the status of challenges they look to address. This writing may take the form of an annual report or a mission report. In any case, these reports are the best and expected place to integrate data visualization because most public reporting includes some amount of numerical data.
Our designs in this space tend to come in two styles. The above example represents narrative driven design. To be narrative driven means the information displayed has a clear insight that we have placed in context and communicate as a story. In our 2023 report, we felt it was important to stress the benefit of being ‘Employment Empowered’, a status the research attributes to high levels of ‘Career Literacy and Network Strength.’ With this insight in mind, we addressed the context through the beneficial outcomes of ‘Employment Empowerment.’ For example, people are more likely to be employed and have increases in annual earnings if they are ‘Employment Empowered.’ We then found ways to visually communicate that story. In this example we used large numbers in the accent color paired with smaller text.
What about that second style? Exploratory design. Not every written item generates an immediate insight that can be paired with contextual understanding to make a narrative. In developing writing about the status of your organization’s focus, you may need to generate a more open design. Be wary of using the lack of a narrative as an excuse for vague design. Designs that do not know what they are can often confuse. For us, exploratory design means having a much simpler message that allows space for the user to explore their own narratives. An excellent example of this would be the image in the very first part of this post—our narrative being, “that’s a lot.” All we are looking to do is show that we have a large amount of activity across the United States. We create space for the user by having an interactive data visualization, allowing them to click on various states and cities to get more information.
Social media
Focus on evergreen media content for a longer development timeline.
It is easier, in some ways, to spend months meeting the broad visual needs of research. It is a different challenge to integrate data visualization into social media. Social media dynamically changes with the interests of those users engaged with it. Given the effort needed to generate a data visualization, this turnaround time might be too difficult; however, social media provides a diversity of subject matter.
Currently non-profit organizations seem to be expected to have a semi-consistent presence on social media. What defines semi-consistent is different for each organization and can vary greatly. For our consideration in this article, let us loosely define a semi-consistent presence on social media platforms as two online posts a week. This non-blog, social media posting rate would hypothetically yield between 52 – 104 posts a year. Not every one of those social media posts is about a unique activity, daily event, or is responding to the public. Some percentage of a non-profit organization’s social media posts are dedicated to ensuring your audience is reminded of issues important to you. This more consistent content is where integration with data visualization can come into play.
We have found success integrating data visualization into more evergreen, social media subject matter. By evergreen I mean topics we think will maintain their value outside of the moment they were crafted. The fact that the posts continue to be relevant in the future and will continue to be used, means you have time to collaborate with your communications team on using data visualization. Take the example above. This social media post is a part of a series introducing and reminding our audience about the Career Explorer Tools that appeared on many social media platforms even if we only show a few here. Here is one on research we funded and a few on a project we support—ProX.
The best advice I can give is to strive for design clarity when presented with a much smaller canvas. Make sure each image’s focus is a single sentence. Our Pro-X work was a great example of this, the underlying research involved matched pairs of students that included research from our data science team. It would be easy to generate pages of analysis, but what did we try to do? Boil it down to key takeaways and then design those for social media. Here is an example: “The ProX experience elevated 63% of interns’ Career Literacy.” Straightforward and the visual of rising bubbles underscored that point.
Public tools
Focus on user needs when making tools for their development.
The usage of data visualization in reports and social media can be less interactive. True, an exploratory design allows you to add space for the individual user to generate their own narrative while still making a broader point. Public facing tools, however, are different. These are data visualizations aimed at guiding a user through a process or experience to uncover insight.
Creating tools for the public requires a lot of background investments in your team and environment. The design has to meet the user’s data literacy level. Awareness of the user’s needs has to drive the tool’s design. Content approval needs to be clear and supported. Any one of these components can cause development hiccups. However, a lot of those costs are one time and will yield benefits across many public tools.
This is where, I believe, we really shine. We dedicate weekly time in our team meetings to discuss where our data comes from, where people can find it, and what they can do with it. We have specialized training on individual subjects spanning from best practices in making a PowerPoint slide to how to debrief after an event. We have even invested in making a streamlined content approval process that allows individual experts to focus their input while still leaving room for feedback. Public tools are always built on a strong team foundation. Let us assume that you are able to build all of these items. What does design look like then?
Our cycle for design of public tools can be found in this piece where I compare data visualization design processes almost a decade apart. The key component is that you need to focus the pain point to a single problem and then work diligently to manage the project. In the case of the above example for this section, we had heard challenges from our users. The feedback was that the 800+ occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics felt too large.
Coming back to our original point of self-exploration, it can be hard to motivate a user to take a journey into themselves if they feel that there are a million outcomes. Everything that we did from that point on became about how we can chunk this information while still displaying large, unique groups. The icons across the top allow for users to search by Agility, there is also a tool to search by annual salary, all the while generating a word cloud aimed at showing you the most possible occupations without overloading the user.
Internal reporting
Focus on teammates’ pain points when making reports for insight generation.
Insight and strong storytelling are key to design. But those concepts do not appear on their own. Team members performing analysis find insights while the team generates stories together. Internal reporting is unique as it supports this process setting the stage for all integrations.
If you want to try an integration, consider this one. The reasoning is that problem solving builds bridges and these reports solve problems for your team. Further, in the non-profit space, problems can be seen daily. It is easy to connect with your team if you are helping them in their day-to-day challenges. The above image exemplifies this principle.
Our organization has many digital resources helping people internally explore with the goal of expanding their economic pathways. One of the most popular of those resources is our Agile Work Profiler © (AWP), a career assessment that ranks your Agilities© (skills universal to all occupations). As of writing, we have over 255,000 lifetime AWP completes that come from every U.S. state and territory as well as across the globe. The AWP helps people better understand themselves in the workplace and therefore better understand their opportunities. The daily counts of this assessment’s usage are an important measure for us and provide an opportunity to integrate data visualizations.
The pain point was around creating insight. We would get a total for a day, but would ask ourselves about that total’s significance. How do we know if it was a “good day?” This was particularly true for our leadership as they reviewed the efficacy of various events. The answer was to create sized-based categories for our daily totals that could be used to measure success of an individual day. In a way, we were creating a text-only histogram that grouped each day’s total completions. The result allowed us to know that any day with 100 or more responses was in our top 15% of all days. Further, we coupled those categories with a listing of our most popular days and rounded it out with an image that showed the amount of days as bubbles.
The design emphasis was on ease and creating sharable numbers. Thirty seconds with this report and we know 800+ AWP completions in a day is a banner day and anything in the 600-800 range is in the top 1% of all days historically. Not listed in this image is the amount of cross information found in the tooltip messages. Notice how this report is fuller and uses less white space than the norm. This is okay as the report is not normally one we look to share externally. When designing for internal consumption, err on the side of sharing more information than less. Obviously, there are exemptions to this rule, like board materials, but for designers, I think it is important to provide multiple pathways to insight.
Closing thoughts
Integration is a key to success as it speaks to the cross departmental use of data visualization. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to be found in this process. The development of solutions requires relationships, clear processes, and a fair amount of education. It is worth it, though, when you see your map in front of a governor or a tool gain over 80k hits. These mountain top experiences should refresh you as a designer so you can step back down into the valley and continue to build solutions that help others.
Christopher Laubenthal focuses on better data use with visualizations in an organizational setting. He has experience in both for-profit and not-for-profit sectors where he increases literacy, grows culture, and builds data visualizations. Christopher is the Data Design Manager at The DeBruce Foundation, a national foundation whose mission is to expand pathways to economic growth and opportunity. Current projects include his public viz and The DeBruce Foundation’s Career Explorer Tools.
