Playing with the numbers

Creativity in my work is all about finding the story in a sea of numbers. I work with a group of fundraisers, taking stock of their efforts and the gifts they have brought in and reporting out to them so that they can tell how they are doing.

The difficulty of this is that numbers aren't all that exciting to many people. Particularly numbers which they see week in and week out, year after year, following the same basic patterns. Hearing that the Annual Fund made $12,348 more this month than last year may be important, but it doesn't succeed in doing either of the things that a good report should do: it doesn't give them anything specific to act upon, and it doesn't do a good job of motivating them to continue doing their work with passion.

So effective reporting requires playing with the numbers. Not changing them, of course, but poking at them and rearranging them, displaying them in new arrangements, looking for the story that they have to tell. It's not unlike the brainstorming activity that we did in class - I can't go in with the answer I want already fixed in my head, but instead I need to use the data as inspiration and continue tossing possibilities at it until some solid ideas begin to show themselves in the array of possibilities.

As often as not, it's a question of finding the right visualization for me - putting the numbers into different types of charts and grouping them by different categories until something stands out so clearly that it has an impact and a meaning that can be immediately grasped.

To take a real example of this, I was recently reporting on the progress of an annual fundraising effort, but to most of our standard reports it appeared to be performing exactly the same as it had the year before despite the fact that several things had changed dramatically - a different group was being appealed to, different events were being held, and so on. Did that mean that the changes had no effect on our population of potential donors? Or was something else going on? I began to chart the gifts in as many ways as I could, organizing the data year-to-year by type of donor, by the types of gifts they made... but when I charted the data by the circumstances of how we asked them, an important story practically leaped off the page at me: last year's events had been hugely successful, and this year's lagged far behind - but we had made up that gap entirely in personal face-to-face asks. It was a story that mattered for two reasons: first off, it was something I could show the gift officers that energized them and made them feel like their efforts had paid off. But it was important in its own right to know - our approach had changed, and it had a dramatic effect on our donors. Rather than assuming that efforts hadn't changed things, we knew that we had strengthened one area dramatically and it was time to find ways to shore up the other area that had slipped.