From Seeds to Harvest: Visualizing 30 Years of Giving
Graphicacy helped the Kendeda Fund explain 30 years of grantmaking with a scrolling, interactive virtual garden that enlivens the fund’s work.
In 1993, Diana Blank started making charitable donations quietly and anonymously throughout her hometown of Atlanta. It was the beginning of a philanthropic endeavor that would eventually come to be known as The Kendeda Fund. Over the last 30 years her grantmaking has supported projects both nationally and globally, ranging from gun violence prevention and girls’ rights to work on climate change, land conservation, and economic equity.
At the end of 2023, Diana will conclude her giving journey and close the Foundation permanently. All told, she will have made more than $1 billion in grants to hundreds of nonprofit organizations.
To mark Kendeda’s closure, Dena Kimball, the Fund’s Executive Director (and Diana’s daughter), approached Graphicacy about visualizing the full reach of her mother’s philanthropy across decades.
From their collaboration, From Seeds to Harvest was born. While Dena first envisioned the project as a gift for her mother, Graphicacy’s dynamic and uplifting digital garden now serves as an inspiring resource for anyone interested in the philanthropy space.
Visualizing an Enduring Legacy
Diana Blank’s plan to spend out the foundation is unusual in philanthropy, and her initial impulse was to walk away quietly when finished. But Dena saw a powerful opportunity for leaving something behind, so she approached Graphicacy with an open-ended request: She wanted to display the full breadth and beauty of her mother’s 30-year-work, something well beyond a basic list of grants.
“The mission was twofold: Focus on what we did and how we did it, and leave a set of breadcrumbs for future philanthropists,” said Dena.
From there, Carni Klirs, Creative Director, Data Visualization at Graphicacy, came up with a surprising and delightful idea: a virtual garden. Kendeda was thrilled by the prospect — especially so given Diana’s lifelong love for the natural world.
Planting the Virtual Garden
Since Kendeda had never worked on a data visualization project, Carni and the team at Graphicacy supported them by explaining chart types and different approaches to visualize the data.
“We showed them the landscape of visualizations we’ve done in this space,” Carni said, “clarifying what ingredients could be in the mix, and whether to be more data-driven and scientific or more artistic.”
Graphicacy came up with three concepts for Kendeda, who opted for the virtual garden that ultimately became From Seeds to Harvest.
“We talked about grantmaking visualized as seeds,” Carni said. The money Kendeda gave to organizations allowed them to flourish over time, and growing plants became the perfect metaphor to represent a proliferation of lasting giving.
“It was a wonderful fit, a way to express our overall impact and how it grew over time,” Dena said.
In the early stages, Graphicacy collaborated deeply with Kendeda on how to express the growth. Equating grant size with leaf size, for example, with smaller grants having tiny leaves and big grants having large leaves, “was against Diana’s way of thinking,” said Dena. Focusing on the dollar amounts alone sent the wrong signal and wasn’t what Kendeda was about. Sometimes a modest grant to a small organization can have a transformative impact in the world. Dollars alone are not the best indicators of importance.
Innovating from that insight, Carni and his team created a garden where each plant stands for a project, the height of each represents the number of years Kendeda provided support, and each leaf represents a single grant disbursement.
Using New Tools to Plant the Seeds
In powering the garden’s animated story, Graphicacy was able to use some compelling new technology. “It was great to extend our capabilities even more, to try new things and learn new creative approaches,” said Carni.
His team also included an R&D period for approaching the project without preconceived notions, and to push themselves to make the final version work quickly in a web browser and load beautifully on a phone.
“We wanted the end product to feel fun and easy to use, and the dividing line between that and something clunky and unusable can be thin,” Carni said. “Kendeda showed a tremendous amount of trust during the process.”
As it all started to come together, Dena saw her trust rewarded. “Graphicacy’s ability to take creative ideas and translate them into a tech environment is very unique. They’re good listeners, which is also rare. Carni and his team had a creative vision from the start and the fluency to execute it,” she said.
As part of his creative vision, Carni also handled the sound design, which included playing guitar on the background music, which plays alongside the visualizations. The sound design helps ground the experience, with sound effects triggered by user interactions, and set a contemplative and peaceful mood.
“That just meant the world to me,” Dena said, “that they’re putting their own selves into the work. It shows nice moments of connection and mutual investment.”
Future Generations to Reap the Harvest
Looking forward, Dena hopes that aspiring philanthropists will find much to inspire them in From Seeds to Harvest.
“The virtual garden that Graphicacy created speaks to the power of a body of work,” she said. “It’s important to represent the beauty of the whole, as a way to ground the conversation for future philanthropists, and Carni and his team were perfect partners for making it flourish.”
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.
