Crowdfunding Website Watsi Creates Interactive Year-in-Review Webpage

When the crowdfunding platform Watsi began assembling its 2015 annual report, it had a goal of providing donors with a clear breakdown of where their money goes.

The nonprofit website allows donors to support people’s medical expenses in the developing world and is committed to “radical transparency,” posting its monthly financial statement — including screenshots of its bank account and staff salaries — on its website.

Its annual report microsite aims to accomplish the same goal.

“We talked with a bunch of donors to learn what about the ‘big picture’ behind their donations they’d want to know more about,” says Grace Garey, a Watsi co-founder. “We also just talked internally about what questions we, ourselves, had about Watsi’s impact. Starting with those questions, we dug into our data and found what we thought were the most interesting, compelling numbers to surface.”

A series of clean, interactive infographics provides information like how many donors gave and how much they gave on average, the demographics of the patients served and illnesses treated, and the medical partners who cared for patients. A map shows the shortest and longest distances a donation traveled.

With each set of numbers, Watsi paired a relevant human story to make the statistics more personal and relatable. The report spotlights individual donors, like Haley and Lizzy, who set off on a six-month cross-country bike tour with their pet rat named Beef and raised $4,229 for health care for 45 patients. In the section on patient demographics, readers meet Kevin from Kenya’s Rift Valley, who at two days old was the site’s youngest patient, receiving treatment for severe head swelling thanks to a Watsi donor.

From start to finish, the report took about three weeks to produce, Ms. Garey says. It was created in-house, largely by the organization’s designer and head of content, who worked with a handful of engineers who helped pull the relevant data and build the interactive page.

The report, which Watsi is distributing to its supporters via email and social media, concludes with a request for readers to make a monthly donation.