Kurt Voelker, Forum One Communications
Policy-oriented organizations have long produced dizzying amounts of statistical content. In the past, rows and rows of data would die a quick death in thick policy reports or inscrutable spreadsheets. Don't let your data fall victim!
Today, there are many tools to visualize and share data online. Smart organizations create and publish their data widely to other sites, widgets, social networks, and aggregation applications. They use data visualization and sharing tools like Swivel, Widgenie, Many Eyes, Google Maps, Google Motion Charts, APIs and more to make their data more available and more compelling.
So how can your organization tap into these tools and trends? In April at our NTC conference panel, we'll dig in and discuss some strategies, advice, and real examples from groups that have had success. But let's start with a few simple principles to jumpstart how your organization can improve its use of data online.
Get your data out of your reports.
At the heart of most issue-focused policy and research is data analysis. Your white papers and position statements are likely chock full of data-tables and simple graphs that support their theses. It's important that these remain a part of the overall report, but the graphs and charts themselves should be discoverable on your site on their own, as well.
Users are more likely to download a full report after seeing a compelling stat or chart, than to wade through a long report in hopes of finding a useful statistical nugget.
Make it easy to find.
You should spend as much time and energy making your data, charts, and tables findable as you do making your reports and other content. If your issue-focused content includes data, create a dedicated area of your site that lets users quickly get to your findings.
Today's web management tools will let you treat your data, charts, and graphs just like any other content -- so you should be tagging and classifying them. Then, your "data library" can be sorted, searched, and filtered just like your publication library.
Make it portable.
Think of your data, charts, visualizations, and graphs like YouTube videos: you want users to spread them around the web easily.
A simple place to start is by using Google’s spreadsheet tools. With just a few clicks, your staff can transform their data tables into embeddable flash objects that are immediately ready for your web site and, just like those YouTube videos, Google's Gadget can easily be copied and embedded by others.. Head over to Google's Visualization Gadget Gallery to see what's available.
While Google provides some nice tools to widgetize your data, there are other simple tools worth exploring to get you started. Widgenie.com offers many ways to create compelling interactive charts and graphs quickly, with results that can be shared as widgets around the Web. Many Eyes, Swivel.com, and Dabble DB offer similar capabilities.
Connect it to the user.
When it comes to presenting data online, simplicity and context are key. The story you want your data to tell will be more compelling to a user if they can relate. Maps, for example, are a global contextualizer -- everyone can personally relate to mapped data.
But there are other ways to let users connect with your data. The Pew Research Center connects its public opinion survey data to web users through simple interactive quizzes. Check out their "Where Do You Fit" series, which asks users simple questions, and then visually shows where they fit statistically against the survey pool. It's a simple example of how you can make your research mean something to the user.
Connect the dots from raw source to visualization to analysis.
To help users discover more -- and trust your information -- you should aim for a seamless connection from the raw source data to your data visualization or presentation to your deeper "report-based" analysis. What's a seamless connection look like? At the most basic level, it means clearly providing links to both the underlying data tables and to your longer form analysis.
Cultivate a community around your data.
If your data is doing all of the above, then people will be interacting with and using your data, understanding the story your data tells, and discovering stories of their own within the data. This engagement can be strengthened even further if you let users not just view your information, but communicate and share with each other.
Simple ways to make this happen include letting users share their own findings, ask questions, and answer each others questions. The Center for Global Development's Carbon Monitoring for Action project, as an example, invites user reactions to their data about power plant carbon emissions. They extend the conversation by providing their own commentary on each plant's data page with blog posts. Cultivating this type of community around your data can extend its shelf life beyond its initial release.
You can also tap into the existing communities at data sharing sites. These sites often combine many of the principles discussed above: letting you upload your raw data, create visualizations of your data automatically, and then connect with other users of the site. IBM's Many Eyes, Swivel.com, Freebase, and DabbleDB's Open Data Commons are great places to start exploring to see if your data might fit nicely into existing communities of users.
Feed your raw data to world.
Does your organization track and aggregate data that's critical to an issue or a sector -- say votes, poverty indicators, energy consumption, or spending? If so, it's likely that your mission will benefit if others can use that data to inform their own analysis, or build their own useful visualizations, or create clever applications that your own internal resources hadn't anticipated nor had the capacity to develop.
Feeds and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the most efficient ways to make this happen on the web today.
Washington DC’s City Government is doing a great job of feeding its raw data to the world. The DC Office of the Chief Technical Officer cranks out more than 261 live data feeds -- everything from crime incidents to trash pick-up delays. Compare that to New York City, which posts city agency information within 10 days of their publication, as PDFs.
Other leading examples include OpenSecrets.org and the National Institute on Money and State Politics, whose APIs have made possible independent projects like Unfluence and WeShowTheMoney.com, both of which provide data visualization tools to map the money networks at work in politics.
Just get started!
Ultimately, when it comes to visualizing and sharing your data online, there is no substitute for creativity, design sense, analytic and statistical expertise, and a thorough understanding of your audiences. Some of the best and brightest from those disciplines are behind many of the tools mentioned here, and your organization can leverage those talents immediately -- and at very little cost.
Happy data visualizing and sharing. I'm looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.
Kurt Voelker is the CTO of Forum One Communications, a web strategy and web development consultancy based in Alexandria, VA. He has 13 years of experience helping some of the worlds largest largest (and smallest!) nonprofit organizations conceive, build, and deploy their web sites and systems. He's also an avid pickup basketball player. You can catch up with Kurt's thoughts on technology and web strategy on Forum One's blogs influence.forumone.com and tech.forumone.com, and on twitter as kvoelker.