It’s mid-year reporting here in my office for Alumni Engagement at the University of St. Thomas. That means I will have to provide a small set of numbers that represent all of my hard work to share to our department leadership. It is a moment that I face with dread. How do I even begin to represent my work with just a few key pieces of data?
This is where I turn to infographics and use best practices in data visualization to help make the case for my program. I can easily compare my performance to goals, highlight areas of success, and provide context for those areas that are underperforming.
Here are the top 5 best practices that I follow when putting my infographic together:
1. Understand your audience
Knowing what your specific audience finds important is key to making a good piece. For example, I create two different year-end pieces. One piece is for my direct leadership and partners who know my work at a deep level. The second is for upper management who are invested in the numbers of my program, but do not need to know the finer points of my program.
2. Providing comparative data for context is key
Whether you compare your data with your set goals for the year, or you compare this year to previous year’s performance, providing comparative data will help your audience better understand the numbers that they’re seeing.
3. Keep the piece clean and simple
To be honest, this is the practice I struggle with the most. Each piece of data feels important to me, because I care about my work. However, these pieces are geared towards helping others quickly understand overview information, and hopefully, inspire them to seek more information as needed.
4. Choose the right charts to represent your data
• Line Charts track changes or trends over time and show the relationship between two or more variables.
• Bar Charts are used to compare quantities of different categories.
• Pie Charts are used to compare parts of a whole and should be used carefully. Never compare two pie charts without clearly noting that the size of the pie may have changed as well.
5. Learn basic design principles
One of the best resources from my AmeriCorps VISTA experience that I keep going back to is the
Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. It introduces basic design principles in an easy to understand format with plenty of examples! Using the practices in conjunction with the above principles will further enhance the professional feel of your documents you create.
There are plenty of free infographic and design programs online that you can use to create your pieces. My favorites are:
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Infogram — I love infogram, because completed projects are meant to be enjoyed on the web. When your audience hovers over the data, it moves and keeps them engaged.
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Piktochart — This is a great resource to make print infographics. They have robust open source icons and charting options.
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Canva — While it’s more of a graphic design driven tool, they’ve recently added more charts and have a great library of templates.