Hi everyone, so I admit that I'm responsible for this graphic (along with other shelter directors). I am a director at Harvard Square Homeless Shelter and we made this graphic to send out to big potential donors for our campaign to have the shelter enter the Harvard endowment. I admit that we did this because it made the graphic looked pretty, and this graphic was made before our class! The objects are not actually to scale and I would probably fail Tufte's lie factor by a wide margin. The graphic, however, shows interesting and real data about how we operate our shelter. On the top bar is the total amount, so the total amount of revenue for our shelter, in kind donations and expenses. you can tell that if you look at the shelter's total expenses they are $51,470 while the amount of revenue that we get from the Mass. Housing and Shelter authority is $31,300, so every year we have to fill in the gap through other means, such as individual contributions, grants, and special events, which are the other elements listed on the left. (The column on the middle gives a monetary worth of things that we get donated, so we do not actually spend money on these.) Our graphic, however, does a good job of dividing all our expenses so that people who are thinking about donating money to our shelter can see how much money each thing such as utilities, and food, rent, guards, etc. cost and what this money is going into. We are attempting to convince people that if the shelter enters into the Harvard endowment, the returns are so big that it can cover the difference in the amount of money we get from the state and the amount of money it takes for us to operate. We will still write grants, etc., but focus on expanding services for guests instead of simply meeting our running expenses.
2 comments:
Do you have a larger version of this? It's a touch hard to read, and I'm really curious.
I'm also curious, when you were making this, how did you decide how big to make the items? IMHO, Tufte really glosses over "what the designer was thinking" / "in what way IS this valid".
apologies for not posting earlier, i am actually organizing a forum for our shelter's 25th year this wed at the IOP so between that and my thesis i'm a bit overwhelmed...
I'm going to try to upload a bigger version, but the problem is that despite the version of the graph i have is bigger, the blog makes it small when it uploads it....
as far as how big I/we decided to make the items, I think it was based on taking the eye to what our biggest expenses are. When people think of a shelter they think all you have to do is provide food and beds, but then people are struck to see that huge utilities bill is actually a gigantic portion of our expenses. so actually with most of the graphs we saw in class with this problem it was change over time that was out of proportion, here it is one expense compared to another that is out of proportion.
As far as what I was thinking, I'll be totally honest and say that after the months i spent fundraising for our endowment, i hate to say this but i think that donors look more to the pictures of homeless people in the brochure and our smiling volunteers rather than the numbers. The visual was just to give people an idea of what we spend on on an increasing basis. i would say that it's more decorative. I mean it's cute, but i don't think that loaves of bread are actually most representative of what we spend our money on since we actually get all our bread donated.
But to answer why this is valid despite what Tufte said, this graph is not just a graph, it's a graph with a purpose and although not perfect it serves that purpose it has within the brochure and that is for people who are thinking about giving us money to know where their money actually goes.
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