A Visual Story: Raising Women’s Political Voices
The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) called on Graphicacy to breathe new life into its data reports about donations to women candidates.
Women remain underrepresented in U.S. politics — they comprise only 30% of state senates and 34% of state houses/assemblies. As the leading source for data on women’s political participation in the U.S., the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) discovered a major factor for the representation gap: funding.
When women do run, they win as much as men. But women aren’t running as much because they don’t have access to the same campaign financing.
A public-facing organization based out of Rutgers University, CAWP set out to draw attention to the disparities through The Donor Gap project, which illuminates the divide between men’s and women’s political funding, candidates, and causes. CAWP turned to Graphicacy for help transforming their standard PDF reports into a dynamic and engaging scrollytelling experience.
Solving the Design Challenge
CAWP envisioned The Donor Gap project providing value to a variety of users, including the media, donors, women candidates, and scholars as well as CAWP’s partners such as political nonprofits, women’s political action committees, women fundraisers, and political parties.
Because CAWP had so much research to work with, their primary challenge became presenting data in a manner that was both compelling and easy to digest.
“We were looking for a way to animate our data, to transform it from static charts and graphs on a PDF page into something users could interact with,” said Kira Sanbonmatsu, a CAWP Senior Scholar and Professor of Political Science at Rutgers.
To execute on their vision, Kira and CAWP teamed with Graphicacy, which has extensive experience with visually portraying social issues such as gender inequality in the U.S. and around the world. Kira first learned about Graphicacy through their work helping Vote Run Lead demonstrate gender disparities in Statehouses.
“We were interested in how Graphicacy might completely rethink how to visualize our data,” she said. “They came with a clear approach that we hadn’t considered, and we were excited to work closely with them.”
A Collaborative Process and Novel Approach
And work closely together, they did. Theirs was an “extremely collaborative process,” said Jeffrey Osborn, Graphicacy’s Creative Director for Motion and Graphic Design. CAWP and Graphicacy partnered for an “intimate back-and-forth, which worked really well in this case,” he noted.
While the CAWP team provided subject matter expertise and shared insights about the underlying data and core user groups, Graphicacy offered guidance around data visualization best practices along with the design and technical acumen for building engaging visual narratives.
“Graphicacy was very responsive and supportive in helping us understand our needs,” said Kira. “Until we started working together, I didn’t really appreciate how collaborative the relationship would be, and I think it led to just what we hoped for.”
Graphicacy helped CAWP structure a story from its data and findings into three sections for users to navigate:
CAWP had stressed their desire to reach more users by creating a resource that looked like nothing they’d done before. Rebecca Lamm, Data Visualization and UI Designer with Graphicacy, impressed CAWP with early sketches that ranged from conservative and familiar to conceptual.
CAWP ultimately chose a more conceptual direction, which Graphicacy’s engineers executed for optimal performance across all devices and platforms. “One of the biggest challenges on the engineering side was in animating the design team’s images in just the right way,” said Rosa Romero Gomez, Ph.D., Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Graphicacy.
Illustrating Complex Concepts
Among other challenges facing Graphicacy’s team was how to guide users through an easily digestible, visually interesting scroll-animated story without losing the data’s richness.
Kira found the conceptual chapter headers that Graphicacy created walked a careful line. “It’s tricky for us, because we’re nonpartisan,” she said, “so we have to be careful about the colors we choose. Money in politics also doesn’t lend itself to particular images. But Graphicacy helped us through a process where the chapter header images worked for all.”
Graphicacy struck the right visual balance between simplicity and visual excitement with its tonal depiction of money and the addition of hand imagery to humanize certain moments.
To visually depict the underrepresentation of women office holders, Graphicacy again used color in the data visualizations to great effect. From the beginning of the animated scroll, horizontal bar charts establish colors for women (purple) and men (green), while a tile map uses a palette of the same colors. The map for “% of money” stands out as overwhelmingly green.
“It’s hard to represent something that is lacking, but Graphicacy did it so well,” Kira said.
Storytelling with Data
With The Donor Gap, Graphicacy helped CAWP move from a world of static reporting to something truly revealing, where charts and graphs come alive to call out disparities.
At the start of each chapter, users find themselves engaging with illustrative and sometimes unexpected images, paired with concise statements. As they explore further, they encounter a series of data visualizations — segmented by demographics, geography, and political party offices and affiliation — to support the key message that women can win races and gain parity, if they’re better funded.
“You’re not just scrolling through animated illustrations and charts,” Jeffrey said. “You reach areas of visual surprise where you can rest, then areas where you can snack on the data or dive more deeply into new information. Bringing data to life is hard to do, but successful scrollytelling does that.”
Graphicacy helps organizations like yours tell informative, provocative, inspiring stories using facts, figures, and trends to show audiences why your mission matters — and what their role is in the fight.
That’s the power of visual storytelling. It draws people in and connects them to the issue and your work on an emotional level. It creates an experience they can’t look away from. And it invites them to do something about it.
Graphicacy has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Resources Institute and the Bezos Earth Fund, the World Bank, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Everytown for Gun Safety and many others.
