Deciding how to communicate your data is as important as analysing it. Finding ways to tell a story with your data is usually more effective that presenting a graph. Highly visual stories such as this Population Mountains article combine compelling visuals with accurate data. We're not quite at this level of expertise (!) but do consider how you can use visuals to help communicate your data.

See this article from the Data4Good Festival for good advice on telling a story with data

After discussions with the awesome DataKind we can recommend 3 free pieces of software to help bring your data to life, and visualise it in interesting ways. They all have a free tier, that allows use of all the features, and you can pay more to keep your visualisations private.

Flourish is a free service that can visualise data, either with a file upload or data copied and pasted straight from Google sheets.

Here's a simple graph created from the loan data for 2 different tools:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/6169946/

Datawrapper is free and has a large selection of charts and maps, which you can import you data into.

There are lots of style choices to help make your visualisations fit your organisation's style. Here is a simple comparison of costs made in Datawrapper - buying tools vs borrowing tools:

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/p9wXF/

Tableau Public is a really powerful visualisation and data software package, but no coding is required.

There are lots of tutorials online and on their website, and there is a high probability that you can find a volunteer or freelancer who has Tableau experience and could use your data with Tableau.

Here is a visualisation of the tools that were loaned most frequently in 2020 (step by step guide to create your own version of this coming soon).

Tableau Public

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