Flickr: qthomasbowerYou may have noticed the recent articles on our blog about data. It's this month's topic here at NTEN (and you should subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter to receive the compiled "best of" version of these articles later this week).

But I want to offer something to this discussion to drive home the point about how your organization's data is important to your work:

Your data is people. Your data is the past, present, and future of your work. And it has the potential to change the way people think about your cause.

I've been reading the articles about data on our blog as they've been posted, and I'd already considered myself a true-believer of using organizational data effectively for your cause, but it wasn't until I picked up the May 16 issue of my New Yorker magazine over the weekend that the power of data, and, more specifically, how we share, organize, and visualize it, really hit me.

In the "Talk of the Town" section of the issue, one of the articles caught my attention. Simply titled "The Names," the vignette shares the story of the difficult task of compiling, organizing, and displaying the names of those killed on 9/11 for The National September 11 Memorial & Museum at Ground Zero, which is still under construction.

Without re-stating the entire article here (go read it), I want to share my big take-aways:

• The people behind the memorial and museum have a story to tell. Their task is particularly difficult because, ironically, it is a story that so many of us know too well already.
• Once they established that they would memorialize the names of the thousands who died on 9/11, the real work began. Should they alphabetize the names? List them chronologically? From the article: " . . . there were, for example, two men named Michael Francis Lynch, and it seemed off, both graphically and emotionally, to have their names appear side by side. A chronological order made no sense, either, considering the manner in which people died. Whichever system he though of -- by workplace, by floor or seat number -- seemed to favor some people over others."
• They finally decided to group names by where they were on that day, which they would be able to translate visually on the memorial ("Around the north pool [of the memorial] would be those who died in the North Tower and on the plane that crashed into it, along with the six who died in the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993").
• Once they decided this, they had to gather the information about the locations and groupings of the victims. They sent out letters to the victim's families, and they gathered the information from the firehouses, the company rosters, the flight records, etc. The information they received in response to their request was complicated and amazing: "Sometimes victims were cohorts, or best friends. In other cases, the families knew, from last phone calls, whom their loved ones had been with in the end . . . and wanted those people listed together."
• Then, once they had the names and associations with place and people they were to use to group people, "the foundation recognized that this job could use the assistance of a computer." They had to come up with a combination of algorithms "which they called the Names Arrangement."

And finally, the result:

"A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else of the total absence of one."

You may think that this story doesn't apply to your cause because 9/11 is different.

But this is where your job starts. Who are the people behind your data? Where is the data that tells the story of the people (or animals, or whatever your area of focus) you're working hard for? 

Sometimes you already know the story you need to tell. Other times, like in the case of this memorial project, the story only emerges after you start the work of compiling your data.

Your data has infinite potential for stories. Your job is to harness that potential to help bring about the change you want to see.