Guest Post by Leslie Payne, Senior Director of Innovation and Creative Services at Arabella Advisors.

I’m a fan of data visualization. I’m not an expert, a developer, or even as frequent a user of visualizations as I’d like to be. But as someone who answers questions for a living, looking closely at complicated and multifaceted challenges like measuring the impact of a grant portfolio, I’m a huge fan of what data visualization represents because it unlocks  so much information.

That said, knowing when to use data visualization is tricky. As more and more data becomes available, we’ll be asking the question more. Below are a few overlapping parameters to use when figuring out if visualization might be right for your data. 

• You want to explain relationships. Take this definition of data visualization. If you spend a few seconds looking at it, you can see data visualization defined as the overlap between design, information, and communication. But for the curious, there’s a lot more information embedded in this deceptively simple image. It pulls out the relationships between factors like story, relevance, and usability, all in relationship to each other.  

• You have a story, not a hypothesis. Visualizations help highlight themes and ideas, as opposed to more traditional written reports that make a statement and then explain or defend it. Take just about anything from Gapminder. Coupling statistical analysis with time-lapse presentations, Gapminder’s presentations tell the stories of shifts over time in simple, yet dramatic ways.     

• You don’t know what questions you, or your audience, want answered. Take this map of movement to and from major U.S. cities. The creators had a ton of compelling information, but couldn’t possibly anticipate the ways in which specific users would want to use it. Plotting the data visually with two stories (movement to and movement from) overlaid on the map lets users find their way through data at their own pace. Imagine the pages and pages of text – and indices – it would have taken to say the same thing with just words.

• Your information focuses on geography. As shown in the example above, maps are among the most popular types of visualizations. When talking about place-based data such as resource allocation or demographics, plotting this information on an actual map can help it gain new meaning. For example, the Foundation Center’s In/Sight couples maps with information from 990s and demographic data sets to help grantmakers and researchers understand the flow of philanthropic capital.

• Your audience wants it. Data visualizations cater to different kinds of learners and thinkers. From distracted web users to readers with learning disabilities, visualizations can help make more information accessible to more people. The foundational books of Edward Tufte are a great resource for understanding how and why the “visual display of quantitative information” promotes learning. 

If you want to learn more about data visualization, there are plenty of great examples out there, such as GOOD Magazine’s infographics section or Visual.ly’s library. There are also lots of free tools for building your own, such as word clouds from Wordle or maps or other visualizations from Many Eyes. Try it – open up your data and see what it can show you. You’ll become a fan, too.