March 4, 2012 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Infographics are a powerful way for nonprofits to tell their stories, but interactive visualizations let people interested in a charity’s work explore the data and find their own stories.
Working with scholars, the antihunger charity Feeding America developed county-by-county estimates of how many people were unable to get the food they need, figures that in the past were available only at the state level. Rather than publishing a report, the organization created an online map that allows people to look at the data at the county, state, and national levels. Since the map went online last March, the estimates have been cited in Congressional debates more than 100 times, according to the group.
People really respond to maps, says Elaine Waxman, vice president for research and partnerships at Feeding America, who says visualization lets people have conversations about concrete places rather than abstract concepts.
“You can say ‘food insecurity,’ and people kind of glaze over,” she says. “But if you show them, ‘Wow, that county is dark, and the reason that county is dark is it means that 30 percent or more of the population is struggling to put food on the table,’ that means something to people.”
Less Expensive
The cost of creating interactive data presentations has been dropping, says Suzanne Kindervatter, a vice president for InterAction, an alliance of more than 190 international aid groups.
Over the past three years, the organization’s NGO Aid Map project has created interactive maps that detail its members’ relief work in response to the global food crisis in 2008, the earthquake in Haiti, and the famine in the Horn of Africa. InterAction spent roughly $150,000 on technology that now lets the group quickly create a map on its own.
But a charity starting a mapping project today wouldn’t have to pay as much, says Ms. Kindervatter: “We were developing this at the same time the technology was developing.”
Too Many Choices
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has used static infographics for several years to help call attention to hot topics in public health, international development, and education, but foundation officials say the fund is moving increasingly toward interactive data visualization, because it wants to be more transparent about the information it’s using.
“People want to know that we haven’t just picked out one specific data point, and that’s all we talk about,” says Dan Green, who oversees media grant making at the foundation.
Not everyone thinks giving people free rein with a nonprofit’s data is a smart approach.
Offering viewers too many options can be a mistake, says Kurt Voelker, chief technology officer at Forum One Communications, a technology consulting company that works with charities and government agencies.
“The user can’t understand what’s important, because you’ve given them too much to do,” he says. “They’re sort of frozen by the choices you’ve given them instead of a nice, simple message.”
