Check out the Nonprofit Data Scorecard here.
The spark that drove our hunt for up-to-date nonprofit data was a desire to tell the story of that community’s ride through the economic recession. In the journalism world, the craft of storytelling is starting to meet the rapidly growing world of data flow – but the effectiveness of that partnership hinges on at least 2 things: the availability of good data and a means of bringing the data to life. And bringing data to life loops back to the basics of good storytelling: with vivid detail, compelling narrative and crisp, functional visuals.
Probably the most exciting part of building the Nonprofit Data Scorecard had less to do with the Scorecard itself and much more to do with the storytelling process – in our case, presenting our findings in the form of an interactive map. Given our tight budget of zero dollars, we knew out of the gate we’d have to find a visualization tool that is free, easy-to-use and sharable. We found all of that in ManyEyes, a free tool from the IBM Visual Communication Lab which came suggested to us by our resident visualization expert, Eric Doversberger. Check out a longer, more in-depth post about ManyEyes here, but in short, ManyEyes allows users to upload their data in spreadsheet format to their website, and then choose from a number of interactive visualization schemes like maps, charts, graphs, clouds and more. In the spirit of openness and collaboration, ManyEyes leaves uploaded data and visualizations open to the public for their remixing, mashing, and repurposing. The best part? It’s very, very easy to use.
During the course of making the Nonprofit Data Scorecard a reality, while budgetless, with an all-volunteer team, it dawned on us that we were in a similar position as many of the nonprofits that could be making great use of open-source data and visualization. So, by virtue of circumstance, almost, we were forced to not only work in a collaborative style, but to create something new from existing tools. The possibilities all of that raises for nonprofits might be another post entirely – but the immediate point is that journalists and nonprofits under similar resource constraints can do this too!
And tools abound. A nice complement to ManyEyes is Google’s relatively new Fusion Tables, a GoogleDoc-style platform that lets multiple people merge data tables and churn out visualizations from a suite of graphs, charts, and heat maps. Similar tools seem to be coming out of the woodwork these days, some of which are crafted specifically for nonprofits. Groundcrew claims to make on-the-ground activism and community organizing easier using a geospatial interface, while OpenAction.org has hit the ground running in its mission to map social change efforts going on around the world. And while at CityCamp Chicago over the weekend, I was tipped off to another free visualization and data analysis tool called Swivel. More analysis on all of these tools to come.
But let’s circle back to the Nonprofit Data Scorecard. You can see all the source data from the Scorecard that Eric Doversberger – the man behind the map – uploaded to ManyEyes here. Interact with the map by clicking on its image, and filter state rankings by category. And don’t forget to take the map with you by copy-pasting the code located below the map in the “embed” button here. We encourage you to share away and explore some of the resources above!
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