July 10, 2013 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As humans, we have a tendency to look for silver-bullet solutions to difficult problems. One of the latest manifestations of this tendency is overestimating the value of big data.
The term big data, if you are not familiar with it, describes the incredible amount of information we are now gathering and sharing, especially about human behavior. The sheer volume of data would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
Along the arrival of all these data sets have come some equally large promises about how they will affect our lives. In the minds of some big-data evangelists, each new exabyte of data produces deeper insights about human nature. And the possibilities for the nonprofit world are enormous. If we better understand how people work, think, act, and interact, surely we can create vastly improved systems for alleviating human suffering and inequality.
But in truth, for every new piece of valuable data, a much larger pile of useless data surrounds and obscures it. It’s tough work to sift through it all to find the pieces that lead us to greater insights.
As an information designer, I understand the important role my industry has to play in all this. As floods of data pour in, more and more people are seeing the value of data visualization, which at its best, has the ability to bring key insights out of the noise and present them in compelling representations.
But information designers offer only one part of the solution. Organizations need to understand what stories they want to tell with their data—ideally before those data sets are even gathered. While it’s important to let the data collections speak for themselves—being careful not to manipulate them to present stories that are not there—it’s equally important to gather the right kinds of data and to do so with a strategic understanding of how they can become insightful information tied to the larger narrative of the organization. When the right data are gathered in the right way and presented intelligently, that is where the magic of data begins to fulfill its promise.
Below are some powerful examples of nonprofit groups using data visualization to tell important stories.
• A look at the rise in drone strikes, designed by Pitchinteractive.com using data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
• A BMAfunders.org map that shows where foundation support is going for groups in the United States that work with African-American men.
• And from Philanthropy Northwest, a graphic that shows what causes grant makers support in six states in the upper northwest.
