Visualisation of data aims to build understanding — helping us spot trends and identify relationships. A growing community of information managers use innovative tools and approaches to help the IFRC extract meaning from data using charts, dashboards, maps and so forth.
The IFRC runs the Nightingale Data Visualisation Challenge to celebrate and stimulate this community — encouraging them to innovate and develop their skills — by setting a challenge which unlocks collective value from data hosted in GO collected from the IFRC membership.
This year, we collaborated with the Solferino Academy to communicate the challenge, with the prize being an all-expenses paid trip to the Global Innovation Summit, held in Nairobi this week. In this blog, we share the background, process and honour the most impressive entries.
What’s hot in #dataviz at the IFRC right now
Demand for surge IM deployments to support emergency operations continues to go through the roof. One of the drivers comes from operations managers wanting to surface the data collected through the operation to explain what’s going on to an external audience.
The use of dashboards (typically using PowerBI) to give a live view into the response, enabling users to slice and dice the data, is on the rise. GO enables flexibility with the tech used to embed such a dashboard and so, while PowerBI dominates, Tableau, D3.js, and Google Studio are also often used due to their specific benefits. We’ve also increasingly seen the use of ESRI Story Maps, which provide a space for story telling through maps, charts, text, images and other engaging features.
Static maps and infographics (often using Adobe Illustrator) are still however the most common data viz product and provide more opportunity to ‘polish’ a product for a specific purpose. Good old excel continues to be the default for ‘quick and dirty’ data exploration — what would we, or for instance the global financial architecture, do without it?
Inspired by Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale’s innovative use of data viz to improve sanitary conditions for soldiers in the Crimean War remains a huge inspiration, especially as she also went on to be one of the founders of the British Red Cross. Her vision to see the story in the data, use of charts and visuals to explain and convince others to effect change, is a story that bears repeating. We look for similar stories which could help our network to use data to learn from each other and improve.
The purpose of this year’s challenge was to leverage the data collected through hundreds of operations supported by the IFRC’s Disaster Response Emergency Fund (DREF). The DREF has recently been integrated to GO — meaning we will be collecting much more structured data from now on — and we are looking for designs to inform analytical functionality on the platform.
DREF operational data is a treasure trove which has been locked away until now. We challenged the network to dream up ways to help our network understand the insights, correlations and stories hitherto hidden in the numbers.
How did it work?
Due to evolutions in the way the fund works over the decades, not to mention passing trends in sector and activity names, we needed to consolidate, clean and trim the data so that participants could use this without much prior knowledge. To help smooth the process, we also developed helpful meta-data and other resources to reduce the barrier to understanding the data. We also hosted a couple of recorded webinars to explain the challenge and answer questions.
We collaborated with the Solferino Academy to communicate the challenge. The minisite created for the Innovation Summit was a great means to host the instructions and the challenge was included in a number of other community challenges run this year.
The voting system developed this year can be found here. It included the expert judgement of a panel of technical and subject matter experts. We also introduced a new step of asking the membership to vote for their favourite, through a Vote of the Community.
Social media posts to call for the Vote of the Community.
And the winner is..
- Overall winner: Ahmad Al Jamal (Palestine Red Crescent Society, Lebanon Branch) — for presenting visually captivating insights with data from the DREF in a PowerBi dashboard, which also incorporates the Nightingale rose diagram.
- Honourable Mention to the best infographic: Celia Song (American Red Cross) — for a visually stunning DREF infographic that combines innovation, aesthetics and harmoniously balanced design.
- Honourable Mention for the best analytical insights: Anita Chen (Canadian Red Cross) — for having included the analysis component in a in an interactive DREF data dashboard.
- Honourable Mention for the Vote of the Community: Sara Lan and Pinky Wong (Hong Kong Red Cross, branch of Red Cross Society of China) — for an elegant DREF data dashboard with insightful graphs and visuls and having mobilised the Information Management community.
I’d like to thank my mum, pet cat, and…
We all love an emotional acceptance speech — so long as it’s short. Thankfully, Ahmad’s words were bang on point.
🎉 Honored and grateful to be announced as the final winner of the IFRC Nightingale Data Viz Challenge! Huge thanks to all those who voted for my project 🏆✨
It’s truly humbling to see how visuals can play a crucial role in understanding and addressing humanitarian highlights.
Thrilled to be invited to the IFRC Global Innovation Summit 2023 to present my #DataVisualization work on a global stage in Nairobi as a prize for this challenge! I look forward to connecting with fellow innovators and driving positive change together! 🌍💡
In addition, the GO team would also like to thank all those involved in the challenge. As the first fully dedicated Mapping and Data Visualisation focal point in the IFRC Secretariat, Luis Fanovich was a natural choice to lead the challenge this year, which he did with his usual calm and class. We also would like to thank the Solferino Academy, especially Heather Leson and Shaun Hazeldine, for letting us piggyback on your incredible ability to cut across the noise — see you again next time? Thanks to the DREF team for collecting all the data and allowing us to use this for the Challenge. And, most importantly, all our National Societies whose lifesaving work forms the base unit of all our data.
Learning for next time
This edition of the Nightingale Data Viz Challenge builds upon the valuable lessons learned captured from the two previous versions. Recognising the importance of continuous improvement, we plan to collect feedback from participants of the challenge and the wider data and information management community to document best practices, identify areas of improvement and develop actionable recommendations to enhance future editions of the challenge.
