allblogs

Sep 14 2022

Powered by our values: Equity, Curiosity, Growing Possibility, Community, and Authenticity

This blog post is part of a series of posts about Innovation Network’s transformation towards equity.

“Innovation is progress in the face of tradition” — Divad @ThereBeKulture

Over the last few years Innovation Network has undergone significant changes that sought to incorporate developments into our organizational structure that have been brewing for years. This included incorporating equity and inclusion in how we function as an organization. This collective and horizontal work encouraged us to rethink our values to more accurately reflect both the work we had been doing and the work we consciously wanted to pursue.

We led with the perspective that values are not simply statements for a website, but rather an ethos to think, work and live by. As a team, we are committed to uplifting projects aligned with our mission: to facilitate meaningful learning and evaluation with and for our partners to advance social justice through equity. Projects where we can actively and proudly embed our values which include equity, curiosity, growing possibility, community, and authenticity.

This is why our first step when reading through, considering, and submitting proposals for any project is to ask ourselves whether these align with our mission and values. Do these projects center and seek to advance social justice and equity? If so, then our work will be purposeful and we will continue by embedding equity and our values within every step of our efforts. Not because we have to, but because our values are a reflection of our team’s beliefs and principles as individuals. This is the first valuable lesson we learned through this transformation process to ensure our team embodies our organization’s mission, vision, and values.

Once we have projects whose mission and objectives seek to advance social justice, our associates, project leads, and project advisors work to implement our values every step of the way. Some key strategies we use to implement these values include the following:

1 We are cognizant of power dynamics and how they affect our work. As external evaluators, navigating power dynamics is not new. However, visualizing those power dynamics and talking about them openly is a new practice that has helped us make changes in the way we do our work to alleviate common marginalization that occurs because of power dynamics. Our team thrives, through our values of equity and authenticity, when we are transparent about the power each of us holds and invite new knowledge and perspectives, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, because we know that diverse perspectives challenge our biases and enrich our projects and findings.

In practice, all our incoming team members are required to undertake the We All Count Foundations of Data Equity training; in addition to other important learning, the training provides them with the tools to create Evaluation Power Maps (check out this example by Heather Krause). For one evaluation that looked at a cross-state coalition, the Evaluation Power Map helped us start a conversation about who is involved and who gets to design the evaluation. We identified that advocates had initially been omitted, which prompted us to create an Evaluation Advisory Group that included advocates as collaborators to design mutually beneficial evaluation questions. The questions developed as a result were far different from what we had expected, centering on the desire of coalition members to explore the purpose of the coalition.

2 We utilize a participatory evaluation design. While we have always taken a collaborative approach with our clients, usually foundations and larger nonprofits, we have shifted to seek out contribution, and compensate whenever possible, the participation of actors involved in the project. This is particularly important to us because historically evaluation and learning have existed in traditionally hierarchical power structures, that not only leave behind but also overburden low-resourced organizations, particularly grantees of funders who may have hired us for an evaluation that involves their grantees. This is problematic because it is the evaluation participants who are doing the vital groundwork to further social justice and have the most experience, yet are often the least engaged in agenda creation and decision making. Our values of community and equity are our guiding lights throughout this strategy, encouraging us to include grantees in the participatory type of work we have always done with our clients

We are working with a Foundation to help them redesign their evaluation and learning objectives and practices to directly benefit their grantees We created a participatory learning agenda and included both grantees and community members throughout the project. We also created an ongoing feedback loop where evaluation participants could share thoughts and concerns about the execution and direction of the project. This was especially helpful as it allowed us to make shorter-term adjustments to the project from both the Foundation and the grantees’ perspectives. Our participatory approach allowed us to ensure the results truly reflected the concerns, desires, and needs of all parties impacted by the Foundation’s work.

3 We aspire to create a culture of trust. To ensure our partners are able to participate actively, we ensure every person is treated with respect, dignity, and empathy. Some strategies to create a culture of trust revolve around the way we listen to each other, ask for opinions and feedback, respond to comments or questions, and provide support to our partners. This effort to be both participatory and create a culture of trust is also why we prefer to call those involved in the evaluation project learning partners. It is a change that shifts our mindset to one of a horizontal and mutually beneficial relationship that recognizes partners as experts of their own experiences with both authority and agency. This strategy highlights our ongoing efforts to live by our values of growing possibility, community, and authenticity.

A clear example of this is our recognition of the evolving process of evaluation and learning during the data collection and sensemaking process of a particular project. In this stage, we found that identified interviewees had felt taken advantage of by someone involved in the initiative we were evaluating and disagreed with the framing in our draft report. We immediately took a step back with humility and empathy, providing space and time for the interviewees to share their concerns. Our team recognized the issue and gave collaborators the power to question the process. We were able to better understand their experience and rework the draft report before presenting it to their funders. This allowed us to have a much more honest and authentic final result and allowed for genuine growth.

4 We embed transparency and knowledge sharing in the evaluation process. We continuously update our partners and collaborators, sharing notes, data, insights, and learning logs. This ensures all involved in the project are on the same page, have equal access to resources, and most importantly, that we have a transparent evaluation and learning process. Ensuring everyone is able to participate actively through honest feedback contributes to an ongoing learning strategy centered around using data for action. This transparency also helps us challenge hierarchical relationships, shifting power towards grantees and community members who are encouraged to participate, co-create and learn with us, highlighting our values of curiosity, growing possibility, and authenticity.

In some of our projects, we create learning logs that capture insights and assumptions that are made accessible, updated, and re-shared to crystallize learnings from each session. Partners have access to a written record of their learning that they can access, at any time, long before any formal report is presented. Learning logs also ensure that those partners that could not join a session are included and given the opportunity to learn and contribute throughout the project.

5 We ensure those who contribute to the evaluation own their data and the way their experiences are portrayed. It is important to think about who is doing the reflection, who is missing from the table, and understand what voices and insights are important to elevate. We want to make sure the final project, and deliverable, is useful for both our client and other evaluation participants. We commonly hold sensemaking sessions to accomplish this. In a sensemaking session, we invite our partners to help us interpret the findings of the evaluation and bring in additional perspectives and insights. This process makes us check our biases, prioritize what is important, and is a facilitated space where partners translate learning into how it can be acted on to improve their work. These efforts highlight, above all, our value of equity as we strive to ensure collaborators have a say in this process, and the findings themselves.

During one sensemaking session, we took particular care to invite the people we had interviewed. The participants pressure-tested the insights we presented during the Sensemaking, weighing in and challenging those that did not align with their experience. Thanks to their active participation, we were able to integrate all perspectives in the final report and create a powerful and comprehensive strategy for the Foundation with recommendations that put forth collective goals that would not only serve the Foundation but also the field of advocacy in the state.

As a team, we have been incorporating many of these strategies for years, but only recently has a critical reflection on our work and a deep organizational transformation helped us distill our efforts into our core values of equity; curiosity; growing possibility; community; and authenticity.

We know that implementing these values with our clients is not enough; we are committed to incorporating our values internally, and today, our team is actively building a culture of trust and intentional, collective, transparent, and horizontal decision-making processes, where everyone’s opinion, independently of their level is respected and leveraged to make decisions.

While we have shared our work ethos and some of our strategies here, we have many more that we currently implement, or are experimenting with that demonstrate the positive impact of a values-based approach, and we know you do too. We encourage you to share and respond to how you incorporate your values into your work or what different strategies you implement to make evaluation and learning more equitable.

Stay tuned to our blog for more ways in which we incorporate our values into our work, reflections, and lessons learned from this transformation process.

Powered by our values:
Equity, Curiosity, Growing Possibility, Community, and Authenticity was originally published in InnovationNetwork on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sep 14 2022

5 Tools that Make Reporting Easier AND Better

In today’s post I’ll share my five favorite reporting tools. And no, my list doesn’t include Excel, PowerPoint, Word, R, Illustrator, D3, Tableau, or PowerBI.

My Quest.

I think I’ve been on a quest. Now I didn’t know I was on a quest.

It was more like something was missing but I didn’t know it. And it occurred the other day as I was re-opening my workshop, just what that missing thing was.

The four pathways.

Over the last decade I came to believe that most data people interested in better data design tend to follow one of four paths.

You could take a coder’s path. Learning things like R, Python, SQL, and Javascript. Maybe you start calling yourself a data scientist or data engineer.
You could take a graphic designer’s path. Learning tools like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Perhaps you take a position in a small boutique design agency.
You could take a BI dashboard developer’s path. Learning tools like Tableau and PowerBI. Here you can get a job in finance or healthcare and join Tableau’s data fam.
OR…you could take the most common path and just stick with trying to create better charts and reports using Excel and PowerPoint. There is nothing wrong with this path, as modeled by Stephanie Evergreen and Ann K Emery, you can do amazing things with these mainstream tools.

As a jack of all trades, I personally tried to take all the paths…

And yes, I learned a lot. Now I can do a little bit of just about everything.

I have worked as a programmer, developing websites and applications, and know a little bit of code. I have designed and illustrated reports for NGOs and nonprofits. I’ve created data dashboards for state agencies and universities. And I’ve also created a lot of Excel charts and PowerPoint presentations for all sorts of clients.

And I thought…well maybe that’s just the kind of data designer I am. The kind that knows a bit about everything. From that vantage point I can help steer others down the right path for them. So I started a workshop all about data design where I could do just that.

I accepted that I didn’t have a straightforward path. But then by accident, I discovered a fifth pathway.

The fifth pathway.

The fifth pathway is a data communications path.

You don’t need code. You don’t need to learn complicated design software. You are hardly ever communicating large enough datasets to need data dashboards.

What you need, is to be able to create professional visual reports and infographics fast. That way you can communicate with a large range of audiences, fill up a social media posting calendar, or just spend less time creating better reports.

The fifth pathway is a mix of UX design, human centered design, agile project management, and template-based design. It requires learning a set of tools developed for social media teams, data journalists, and UX/UI designers.

It’s not a mix of the other pathways. It’s something different.

And long story short, that brings us to…

My five favorite reporting tools.

All five of these tools are nimble and web-based. They all offer free plans that can be used to create viable pro designs.

With these tools you can design professional social media illustrations, one pagers, infographics, slide docs, executive summaries, print reports, presentations, GIFs, videos, interactive web reports, and simple interactive data dashboards. Even on the free plans none of the five tools expose your designs to the public, unless you intentionally decide to share the designs publicly.

These five are increasingly becoming the tools where I spend almost all of my time as an information designer.

Number 1. Canva

Canva for me is most everyone else’s Microsoft Office. I design almost everything in Canva. It’s where I design social media images, infographics, slide decks, and print reports. I even use Canva to develop online course videos. Oh, and I also used Canva to fully design my both of my print books.

Canva isn’t a design tool with some supporting digital assets (icons, photos, and videos). It is a full asset collection that just so happens to also be a design tool. It’s templates and asset libraries that make design faster.

You can do a ton with Canva free, but for the cost and what you get I think Canva Pro is will worth the money (I’m a partner because I love the tool, so that’s an affiliate link). If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I don’t do that often.

Number 2. Adobe Express

Adobe Express used to be called Adobe Spark. And spark was an old favorite of mine as tool to create videos, interactive digital reports, and the occasional illustration. But for years Adobe kind of just let Spark just exist without many updates or new features.

I think Canva’s success has pushed Adobe into reinvesting more into Adobe Express. Because lately the tool seems to be getting better. There are now a few things that you can do for free in Adobe Express that are only part of the paid plan in Canva, like a background remover. Adobe can also draw upon its huge collection of stock images and other assets.

While Adobe Express isn’t taking much of my time away from Canva, it is a viable tool that hopefully should be getting better and more competitive with time. Also, if you already have a licensed Creative Cloud account, you already have a pro Adobe Express account.

Number 3. Flourish

Canva has a native chart builder. But…it leaves a lot to be desired. I think that is one of the reasons Canva acquired Flourish.

Flourish is a chart building tool designed for data journalists but totally useful for any of us. With the tool you can create the kind of simple interactive charts you see attached to major news articles. Unlike Excel, which often feels like you have to break in order to create a good chart, Flourish helps you create better charts faster.

The pro version of Flourish is expensive, it really is set up for use by newsrooms and larger organizations. But luckily the free version allows you to do almost everything and is completely viable even without a pro account.

Number 4. Datawrapper

Datawrapper is in the same class as Flourish regarding target market and general use. I think in some ways it’s a little easier to use but without as many features. It’s free plan is also slightly less good with no SVG export

That said, Datawrapper can easily do some things that Flourish cannot. Datawrapper is a pretty awesome map making tool. It’s also really nice for tables with microcharts. And since there is still a ton you can do with the free plan (SVG downloads aside), it’s also worth your time trying it out.

Number 5. Figma

When I started writing this post I almost left Figma off the list. It is an amazing tool, but it’s not a template based tool like the other four.

Figma is a UX/UI design tool similar to tools Adobe XD and Sketch. But Sketch is Mac-only (and costs money) and Adobe XD requires a download (it has also been increasingly hiding its free version). I’ve used all three tools, and each has its positives. But I put Figma here because it is entirely web-based and the free plan is full-featured.

Figma is not a tool that will necessarily make your workflow faster. But what it CAN do, is allow you to tweak the things that are hard to tweak using the other tools. For instance, if you save a Flourish chart as an SVG, you can drop that chart into Figma and pick the image apart. Meaning you can get rid of elements, change colors of individual elements, and add annotations.

It gives you the kind of freedom you miss when using template-based tools, which makes it an ideal finishing tool.

Want to learn more about Data Communications?

My workshop is open again for new registrations!

It includes…

Weekly Sessions (every Wednesday)
Session Recordings (50+ hours and growing)
Self-Paced Courses (in the process of recording more, all will be included)
Private DiY Data Design Newsletter (once a week with tips and inspiration)
Data Design Template Library (also will be growing soon)

And if you can’t afford the $99/month ($999/year), I have three no ask necessary scholarships for 25% off, 50% off, and even 75% off.

Click here to learn more about the workshop, the scholarships, and to register.

Sep 07 2022

Stop it with the Interactive Dashboards

So your organization gave you a Tableau license. Or perhaps you attended a half-day PowerBI workshop. Now you’re ready to use your new tools and make some of your data interactive.

But should you?

Cartoon person looking at data dashboard thinking, "this could have been an infographic"

Not everything should be interactive!

Tools like Tableau and PowerBI give you the ability to pack a lot of data into a small space. This can be incredibly useful when you have a lot of data that you want to open up for exploration.

Good interactive visualization can reduce the overwhelm felt by the data user. It does this by layering the data and presenting just little bits at a time. Because when you have thousands upon thousands of rows of data you need to simplify the experience.

But when you only have a little bit of data, creating an interactive dashboard does more harm than good. Instead of opening up a large dataset, you end up hiding data from your dashboard user. In order to find all the data that could easily fit on a single page, they need to click, and click, and click.

Example: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) Interactive Visualizations

NHANES is a big multi-year multi-million dollar CDC study that has collected lots of data over the years. And according to their website, they have some new interactive visualizations.

Screenshot of NHANES Data Products Page — NHANES data products page.

Their visualizations are some basic Tableau dashboards showing the prevalence of high total cholesterol, hypertension, and obesity in the US across ten points in time. The data is also filterable by Sex, Age Group, and Race and Hispanic Origin.

The initial visual we are given is a line graph showing high total cholesterol representing all adults 20 and over.

Screenshot of NHANES Data Dashboard — NHANES Interactive Visualization

For all its options and buttons, this is a small set of data for a dashboard. You find that out quickly if you download the CSV file.

The data for all three topics, sex, and age groups fits within 6 columns and 360 rows of data.

The race and hispanic origin data was not found inside the CSV, but it really doesn’t add a ton of data to the overall dashboard. Especially since the data is not broken down for every age group and there are some missing values due to low sample sizes for those groups.

Screenshot of Race and Hispanic Origin table.

All in all, the data represents hundreds of rows not thousands.

An alternative: create a series of charts.

The alternative I would pitch would be pretty simple. Instead of creating an interactive dashboard this data could be presented in a simple series of charts. Then you add narrative around each giving additional explanation and context.

For instance here are the charts for all adults 20 and over for each of the three topics (high cholesterol, hypertension, and obesity).

Screenshot of NHANES dashboard obesity line chart — You can see the full dashboard using this link.

Screenshot of NHANES dashboard hypertension line chart

screenshot of NHANES dashboard cholesterol line chart

These same three charts could easily be visualized in a single chart. We can even use some subtle interactivity through a tool like Flourish. Here is an example of the same data represented in the above three dashboard views but in a single chart.

I embedded the chart here, if it’s not loading you can find the original using this link.

One chart will not replace the full dashboard.

That would just be the initial chart.

I would then split up the three topics. And for each topic, I would show the data split by sex, age, and race.

In total, it would be ten charts with supporting narrative. None of the data would be hidden, and you wouldn’t need an explanation about how to explore the data. The page would feel more like reading a news article.

The Takeaway.

If your interactive dashboard would need 100s of charts to show the same amount of data, then a dashboard is the right call. But if your interactive visualization could be replaced using a handful of charts, you should just use the handful of charts.

Sep 06 2022

From Peaks to Print: Visualizing My Hiking Journey

Recently I completed a personal hiking milestone. So in true nerdy evaluation fashion, I wanted to honor my experience with a data visualization. This post shares three tips for creating engaging visuals: Incorporate icons, use color intentionally, and label directly.

The post From Peaks to Print: Visualizing My Hiking Journey appeared first on Elizabeth Grim Consulting, LLC.

Aug 30 2022

Stop Speaking for the Data

It’s late August, and are into another hot week here in North Carolina. So yet again I was outside with the hose watering our little vegetable garden. And in that meditative moment I thought about The Lorax.

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.

The Lorax by Dr. Seusss

"I am the lorax, I speak for the trees."
"Sorry, one sec, I'm responding to a text."

Even as a kid I really felt that story. And I think it connects with what we do when we report, but maybe not in the way you might think.

By now you might be sick about me talking about my book (The Reporting Revolution, now on Amazon). But honestly, even though it does have almost everything to do with my consulting work, the book was still a passion project. I believe that if we want our work to stay relevant we need a mindset change when it comes to reporting.

We don’t need to speak for the data.

"Thanks to new AI technology our data can now speak for itself."
"Well, first off, I pronounce my name "Day-Ta" not "Dah-Tah."

When a lot of researchers and evaluators talk about reporting, they’re really talking about documenting.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a real need to document our work. To write down everything about our methods, our analyses, our findings, and our recommendations. This is why I don’t despise 100 pagers. They have a role to play, it’s just not as a report.

Reporting is different than documenting. Reporting is less about capturing and more about communicating. Communicating is about connecting with real life people.

When you spend a lot of time with your work you start to believe that it needs an advocate. For example, if you have dedicated your last few years to collecting data, you will likely feel a responsibility to advocate for that work.

But our data work is a means, not an end. Data is only valuable in so much that’s it’s useful. And useful requires a user.

We do need to advocate for the people.

Reading a long report is like talking to an oversharer at a party.
"To start I want to tell you about alllll my methods. Actually, first let's talk about the methods we didn't choose and why."

Thinking about your audience as you are documenting your work is not enough. You need to be an advocate for the people who could use your work.

Unlike trees, people have tongues. But most potential data users do not have a seat at the table as you collect and analyze your data. So they don’t have a voice in the decisions you make when sharing your work.

Being an advocate for your audience means seeing your data through their eyes, not your own.

This is why a report can be 1 pager or an infographic. Because the goal for these designs is rarely to document a project but communicate something of value for a specific audience.

If you can, join me tomorrow.

It’s a launch party, it’s going to be informal and fun. It’s also free with door prizes!