Data has permeated our daily lives. Data about the places we visit, the food we eat, the spaces we live in, and every other life choice is continually mined, rigorously analyzed, and stored to predict what our future preferences may be.
As our tendency to analyze and store data grows, so does the importance of being able to visualize this data meaningfully. This trend of increasing our inclination to depict data visually is apparent across industries, from the media’s increasing usage of graphs and charts to the technology sector’s use of complex visual dashboards to track product performance.
In essence, data visualization is transforming data from its most raw and jagged form into a refined representation that is easy to interpret.
As data visualization takes on a greater role in our everyday lives, it is imperative to recognize the power it holds in helping us answer some of the most challenging questions we grapple with as a society.
The questions listed above are but a few in the long list of development challenges that humanity wrestles with today. Data visualization holds the key - not only to answer these first-order, larger-than-life questions, but also to answer smaller-scale questions to enhance impact locally within communities. With data at our fingertips, visualizing it effectively can aid the development sector in identifying and magnifying low-hanging fruits for greater impact.
To visualize data, derive the best insights, and pick the right tools for the job, the first step is narrowing in on the kind of questions you’re trying to answer. In this article, we elaborate on three broad question categories, and the best tools to leverage your data into insights:
Professionals in the development sector often spend their time comparing multiple interventions to achieve a specific impact goal. For example, a few common interventions to improve educational outcomes in children include the following:
If an organization had to pick one (or a combination of two) to implement, it would have to perform a comparative analysis of the impact and cost-effectiveness of these interventions. Analyses like the one described above are common in the development sector, with professionals and organizations debating between multiple interventions every day.
For these questions, a comparative analysis using a full-fledged visualization tool could serve to be very useful. Tableau, PowerBI, Google Data Studio, Looker, and Qlik are the most well-known visualization tools in the market. These tools can help you build dashboards and charts that compare the different interventions over factors such as impact, cost, and cost-effectiveness by region or even by district.
Full-fledged visualization tools include several basic features (filtering, colors, custom charts, etc) and even some special features such as forecasting, clustering, and other analytic add-ons that can help further your insights.
This visualization by Bloomberg New Energy Finance tracks cross-border investments in renewable energy by type, investor, and recipient. This dashboard can be an important tool in understanding the funding going into renewable energy projects and the potential carbon offset it may bring about. This dashboard is created on Tableau, is publicly available, and is a copyright of Bloomberg.
Development is a cross-sectoral and collaborative space. Due to the diverse nature of the impact sector, it is important to recognize the different stakeholders and their roles in the space.
For this, mapping out the different actors and their relationships is paramount. Visualizations such as social network analyses, system maps, and geo maps can help in pictorially mapping out the key stakeholders in a particular sector and/or region, the relationship between these stakeholders, and the market ‘power’ these stakeholders possess.
Understanding and mapping out relationships between the stakeholders of an ecosystem can be a valuable tool for larger organizations looking to invest in or partner with organizations in a region or sector, or for social enterprises that wish to break into a new market.
Tools such as Kumu, Graph Commons, and Onodo enable you to construct relationship maps and include a host of features that facilitate a better understanding of an ecosystem. To give you an idea of the features they host, here are a few examples:
Kumu and Graph Commons also allow you to create presentations that ‘tell a story’, emphasizing specific sections of the mapping and analyzing these sections. This example of a Kumu presentation displays the mapping of Morocco’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, zooms in on specific market influencers, and analyzes their market power and capabilities.
This demo maps out the stakeholders in Morocco’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. The colors are used to distinguish the different types of stakeholders. The sizes of the circles represent the market power (level of connection) that the entity holds. This map was created on Kumu.
In today’s fast-paced world, combing through a long-form report can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Adapting to changing market sentiments, some organizations have taken to visualization and dashboarding as a way of presenting their impact in a manner that is not only more palatable but is also more compelling to the target audience.
Presenting impact visually can allow for focus on the intended metrics, including, but not limited to, the following:
Annual reports can be presented as dashboards that highlight the organizational impact and can live on the website, drawing attention to the tremendous impact an organization is having.
While building complex visualizations that are often required to track impact, using tools such as Tableau, PowerBI, Google Data Studio, Looker, and Qlik that help build large dashboards with customizable metrics is essential. This can be particularly useful for foundations that give out grants every year or for non-profits that are looking to track their impact over time.
Visualization is more than just charts and data.It’s often about storytelling and drawing insights from the story the data is telling you. As the world moves towards being more data-driven and measuring the social impact, the development sector must adapt and leverage this powerful instrument to create and scale impact.
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