Data Visuals That Wow: 5 Easy Ways to Show Impact

Clear data visuals are among the most powerful tools a foundation or nonprofit can use to communicate progress, inform decisions, and build trust with stakeholders. A successful chart shows at a glance what you are achieving, answering common questions about your organization’s impact.

Yet too often, useful data is buried in cluttered reports or slide decks that require extra effort to interpret. If your audience can’t understand your impact, your chart has failed its purpose.

Creating impact charts that look sharp and support strategic decision making is easier than you might think. These five visualization strategies will make your data crystal clear.

Answer the question in your chart title.

A straightforward chart title is one of the easiest ways to tell the story of your data. However, when you make a graph, the program often auto-fills two vague words at the top, such as “Chart Title.” So, we think of something equally opaque, like “Reach.”

But a name like “Reach” is going to have your audience wondering, “Well, what do I need to know about reach? What’s the bottom line? Is your reach bad or good?”

Instead, swap in a clear takeaway statement, like: “Our portfolio reached a record 4,368 high-school seniors this quarter.” A descriptive title answers the first questions that will bubble up for your audience and shifts the conversation from confusion to congratulations.

Annotate your trend to add context.

Imagine that your foundation awarded grants to upgrade refrigeration and transportation logistics for organizations that provide food assistance. Now you want to see exactly how much capacity has increased, so you created a line chart to depict the average number of households served, over time.

I’ve annotated two points along this trendline. Cover those annotations with your finger. You will immediately notice where the line goes up, showing an increase in the number of households served. But you won’t know what caused the rise — the first question any curious mind will ask.

If you work at the foundation, you already know you distribute your grants in January, but an outside observer might see the February dip and wonder what happened. The annotations explain.

Annotations are easy to add: You just insert a text box and add a few words. The payoff is huge in that these notes explain what happened and when, making it easier to see how your interventions made an impact.

Combine those annotations with a compelling chart title and you have a high-quality data visualization that clearly communicates your progress. When we have clarity in the visuals at the core of our discussions and meetings, we can advance the conversation faster.

Swap bar charts for next-generation graphs.

There’s nothing wrong with a well-designed bar chart. However, fresher alternatives can make it much easier to quickly identify patterns in your data.

Say you surveyed your grantees about the helpfulness of your technical assistance, where you ask them to evaluate aspects of their experience on a scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” You’ve given them statements to rate, such as: “The technical assistance provided by the foundation met our organization’s needs.”

Graph the survey results with a diverging stacked bar chart. In this chart type, we divide the response options, grouping negative answers on the left side and positive answers on the right side.

This arrangement gives at-a-glance insight into areas of strength — and identifies opportunities for improvement.

Identify gaps with dumbbell dot plots.

Many nonprofits that support marginalized populations work to close equity gaps. This mission focus is a perfect opportunity to use a chart type that highlights the distance between groups.

How did your program improve the graduation rate for priority populations? Plot out their individual graduation rates over time with a dumbbell dot plot.

Each group is represented by a dot. The line between the dots draws attention to the space between your data points. You’re showing your impact when that gap starts to close.

Compare the dumbbell dot to the same data graphed in a basic column chart.

In the column chart, it’s much harder to detect the progress.

Newer chart types, like dumbbell dots and diverging stacked bars, can significantly expand your storytelling capacity because they elevate stories that are harder to perceive in traditional chart types. All of these can be made in the graphing software you likely already have on your computer, like Excel or Google Sheets.

Use color more accessibly.

Many organizations rely on a red-yellow-green color scheme, where red marks areas that need attention and green highlights where you’re on track. I often hear from clients that it’s intuitive because everyone knows how to read a traffic stoplight.

However, red-green is the most common form of colorblindness. The red-green type of colorblindness affects about 8 percent of men with European ancestry and roughly 6 percent of East Asian men. People with this colorblindness see both red and green as similar shades of a muddy green-brown. They won’t be able to distinguish between what needs attention versus what is working well.

If your audience can’t understand your impact, they can’t amplify it. So, if we literally want our charts to be clearer, we need to use a more accessible color palette. To be more inclusive, try red-orange-blue or orange-yellow-purple instead.

With just a few thoughtful edits, your impact visuals can go from murky and forgettable to clever and effective.

Clear, accessible data visuals help ensure that the right insights spark the right conversations at the right time. In philanthropy, that clarity isn’t just nice to have — it’s part of how we fulfill our mission and our promise to those we serve.