May 18, 2017

Say NO to PDFs — 6 key trends for not-for-profits and your data-driven digital content

By their nature, most not-for-profit organizations are data-driven. They play an important role in society by aggregating information and offering services including, sharing facts and statistics. Also, nearly all of them publicly report on their performance. Interestingly, this sector has also struggled with digital capacity and access to the latest tools to present data-driven content in dynamic ways online. Many of the sector’s best data stories are locked away in PDFs. We can do better. A rise in affordable digital tools can help us more easily understand data, build visuals to get new perspectives, and answer business questions. It has never been easier to present rich, immersive data visualizations and data stories online.

As a strategist, I stay abreast of important trends in many aspects of the digital experience. Increasingly, clients and partners are recognizing that how their data is presented can’t be considered in isolation from how it is generated, analyzed, and stored. The strategy you develop has significant implications for the output and the desired output can have significant implications for the strategy.

Over the last few years of developing digital strategies for not-for-profit clients with my colleague and frequent collaborator Jennifer Birch of Indago Insights (an Ottawa-based research consultancy), we’ve gathered a trove of examples of leading practices in data visualization / presentation. Putting our research and analysis skills to work, it appears there are six key trends at play across sectors including health, finance, demographics and social trends, policy and politics, sports and the media. Data-driven not-for-profits can learn from these as they design and implement better data visualizations and data stories online.

2 trends affecting all others

Number 1 – Storytelling

The fact that entire careers now revolve around turning data into stories reinforces the importance of this ability and continuing trend. Deeper emotional responses can be created when we share data in story format. For this reason, data journalism is a burgeoning field.

“We’re faced with more and more data every day. No longer is it enough to ‘show’ the data—to have an impact, we need to turn the data into information and consider our audience and what will resonate with them in order to motivate them to action. My view is that we should never simply show data, rather we should make data a pivotal point in an overarching story.”

– COLE NUSSBAUMER KNAFLIC

Data storytelling relies on the use of videos and visuals to reinforce the narrative. News organizations such as The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and ProPublica are great sources of inspiration for producing data-driven online stories. They can vary greatly in their presentation but often include interactive visualizations.

Number 2 – Integration and Interrelation

Now that organizations have an endless amount of rich data, the big challenge is how to bring structured and unstructured data streams into a single place where they can be cleaned and analyzed in an integrated way. Data Integration (DI) is not new, and aims to facilitate understanding relationships between the variables.

The advancement of Business Intelligence (BI) tools to help make sense of all the integrated information is also an important factor. When PCMag evaluated the best BI tools of 2017 they rightly noted that BI used to be mostly for specialists but with the improvements in tools that intuitive and easy-to-use, many business executives can now take advantage of “self-service BI”. Self-service tools like IBM Watson or Einstein Data Discovery are also driving forward the adoption of predictive analytics.

The convergence of these two trends — telling stories with complex, intricate data presents a significant challenge for those working on the user experience end of digital data stories and reports. It calls for more sophisticated ways of displaying complex data simply and usefully.

4 approaches for presenting data-driven content

In order to meet this challenge, four approaches are proving successful, if not essential:

Personalization
Self-Service Analytics and Interactivity
Motion / Animation
Virtual Reality

Personalization

Closely related to self-serve / integration, personalization refers to combining the data we can collect about individuals (profile, behavioural, attitudinal) with the data itself to offer more meaningful interactions. Rather than offering stakeholders more data and visualizations to interpret we could personalize data and products based on what an individual is most interested in.

“Consumers are already accustomed to receiving dynamically personalized content experiences. Amazon presents homepages with content “related to” and “inspired by” the items you viewed, and Netflix, recommends shows you might like based on your previous viewing habits. Google “auto-fills” search suggestions and Facebook tailors your news feed based on content you’ve liked or shared. It’s experiences like these that drive consumer expectations for personally relevant content from brands on a regular basis.”

– ONESPOT

As organizations continue to improve at combining data from across silos to derive insights, this data can be used to affect visualizations by changing the look and feel, functionality or behaviour of individual tools.

Self-Service Analytics and Interactivity

In order to carry out predictive analysis, users need to be able to interact with the data and generate various views that tell different stories or predict different scenarios. The self-service model is essential to enabling this use-case.

Interactive data visualizations that allow users to choose different variables to see particular stories or toggle between different pre-set views to show different aspects or analysis of a question or theme are popping up everywhere.

Motion and Animation

Motion and animation have become something that users expect from good interfaces. These approaches are particularly important for the field of data science where animation has become an important part of the storytelling mix. Since we have the web and powerful devices with us at all times, building and sharing interactive stories becomes a smart idea. One of the reasons motion and animation is so important in the field of data science is because the experience of consuming information in this way can be delightful and therefore, memorable. These are also very practical applications, in that they can show the progression of data points over time or show how data points shift as other variables change in fluid and relatable ways.

Virtual Reality

You can’t explore big data, data analytics, data visualization or data reports without uncovering many conversations about the increasing role that virtual reality is having in these spaces. Around the world researchers and labs are working with immersive virtual reality to visualize data. Thanks to this technological advance, it’s now possible for users to step into three-dimensional data visualizations that let them fully interact with the data.

Virtual reality is an important advance in data visualization because as Forbes has noted, “there are inherent limitations in the amount of data that can be absorbed through the human eye from a flat computer screen.” When we use virtual reality to immerse users in spaces with “a 360-degree field of vision and simulated movement in three dimensions, it should be possible to greatly increase the bandwidth of data available to our brains.” There are many examples of how VR is being used to help us better understand data and it is anticipated that we’ll see more and more of this technology being used in data science in the coming years.

So what does this all mean for not-for-profits and data visualization?

While these approaches are all attractive and bleeding edge, it’s important to think about which are feasible to consider and also, the skills required to deliver these formats. Each of these trends and approaches offer a spectrum of applications meaning that even the most modestly resourced organizations, can, with a certain degree of creativity, be experimenting with elements of them. Consider conducting pilot tests in each of these areas. This might even involve forming partnerships with other organizations like universities or design labs as might be the case with something as advanced as virtual reality.

Say no to PDFs and start experimenting today

No matter what, the bottom line is that if you’re a data-driven organization it’s important to start thinking about how to tell better data stories online. How can you let your stakeholders explore your information in their own ways and how can you proactively tell stories and answer their questions? Remember, how data-driven digital content is presented is of equal importance to the data itself. When data is beautifully presented it engages your audience’s emotional side and can be a quick way to inform, engage, and incite behavioural change. Experiment with free tools and look to other industries and data journalists for inspiration.

It might just be the right time to build strategies for how you store, analyze and present your data to your stakeholders so you can have even more success connecting with them and meeting your objectives.

If you’re using new and interesting data visualization tools with a high degree of success, I’d love to hear about it or better yet, see examples of your data stories online. Send me a message. And, if you’re working at a data-driven organization but struggling with your content strategy or digital infrastructure, I can help! Don’t hesitate to reach out and we can discuss your challenges and plot a path forward.