Revamping Pew’s Fiscal 50 with Dynamic Visualizations

When their respected Fiscal 50 website needed refreshing, The Pew Charitable Trusts connected with Graphicacy to make it mobile-friendly and modern, complete with new state-specific pages.

In 2013, The Pew Charitable Trusts launched Fiscal 50, which aimed to help policymakers at the state and national levels, the media, and the public understand what drove long-term budgetary trends. The site featured interactive graphics for fiscal and economic indicators that measure states’ long-term fiscal health.

At the time of its launch, the innovative Fiscal 50 soon became a respected resource. But, as it celebrated its 10th birthday, the site was starting to show its age.

To revitalize the Fiscal 50 site and bring it into the modern era, Pew joined forces with Graphicacy to redesign and develop a responsive suite of charts with an enhanced state-level focus as well as an inventive process for regularly updating text and figures as new data rolls in.

Building on Trusted Resources

“After 10 years, there came a natural need for reimagining this work,” said Melissa Maynard, the Project Director for Fiscal 50. “We had a clear expectation of what users wanted to get out of our platform and what they’d come to expect from it, but also saw a clear need to shake things up and experiment with new approaches.”

A member of the creative team at Pew recommended that Melissa reach out to Graphicacy, as the two organizations’ approach and aesthetic aligned. Through a competitive proposal process, it became clear to the team at Pew that Graphicacy had fully embraced the project’s vision and goals and would bring innovative ideas to the table. “Working with Graphicacy would also push us out of our comfort zone,” Melissa noted.

The addition of Graphicacy created a “tremendously powerful, three-way creative collaboration between the Fiscal 50, Pew creative and digital, and Graphicacy teams,” she continued. “Each team member brought their strengths and instincts to push the overall project in a more ambitious direction.”

Speaking Each Other’s Language

Graphicacy welcomed the challenge to develop a top-to bottom rebuild of the Fiscal 50 site. “We immediately saw the need for a more responsive and flexible platform,” said Carni Klirs, Graphicacy’s Creative Director, Data Visualization. “Working with Pew, we aimed to build a new mobile-first site that would work on any device and run on modern browsers.”

Pew also needed a platform they could expand upon, by adding more chart views over time and easily updating the data on their own. “The site will be updated every few weeks with new content,” Melissa said, “and each of Fiscal 50’s eight signature indicators will be updated once or twice a year as fresh data becomes available.”

To allow for frequent site changes, Graphicacy built a toolkit for the Fiscal 50 team. “We’ll work with Pew’s creative and digital team to leverage the toolkit and continue to collaborate with Graphicacy to help enhance it,” Melissa explained.

“We had to learn each other’s language while figuring out how to update the site,” she continued. “Carni and the Graphicacy team were wonderful communicators. They took the time to listen to us, to learn our approach and help us through our learning curve.”

Dynamic Data at the State Level

Along with bringing the Fiscal 50 site into the modern, mobile-first era, Graphicacy tackled Pew’s need to create individual state pages for the first time.

“Some of our audience follow state budget trends from a national perspective, but most people are primarily interested in what our data and research mean from their state’s vantage point,” Melissa noted.

“With this overhaul, Graphicacy helped us reframe the data and our insights for each state, but in a way that also provides national and regional context.”

To that end, Graphicacy built dynamic state-specific pages that combine data and research insights from Pew’s fiscal teams. The pages display the performance of eight key indicators for each state, and every indicator has an interactive dot plot, which can be expanded to show more detailed information.

The state pages now live alongside the Indicator pages, which have been completely redesigned and rebuilt from top to bottom. Pew and Graphicacy collaborated on the structure and flow of the page and on weaving explanatory text between chart views to aid readers’ understanding.

“We designed and built a comprehensive charting system, which includes a map, line chart, area chart, a few different kinds of tile map, and bar charts. Each chart was designed flexibly to be re-used across different indicators, with a high level of customization,” Carni said.

Data-Driven Text

To support these new features and enable frequent updates, Graphicacy developed a stand-out feature for the revamped Fiscal 50: data-driven text.

“We built a dynamic text engine, which lets Pew write narrative text with tokens that can be replaced by data values. These are updated on the fly to show the current data displayed in the charts. The engine can also handle functions and conditional statements, such as displaying ‘greater than’ or ‘less than,’ if a number is higher or lower than another number,” Carni explained. “Drafting copy with dynamic text might look intimidating at first, but we trained them on how to use it with confidence.”

“The data-driven captions provide additional levels of granularity and insight specific to each state,” Melissa said. “As we have regular data updates, they’ll do a lot of the heavy lifting and save our staff time that we can redirect toward producing additional content for the new platform.”

While the dynamic captions will lighten the load on Pew’s team, they retain the in-depth analysis the organization is known for. “We’re still providing a detailed analysis that walks readers through the data and answers the question ‘what does it all mean?’’’

An Ongoing Partnership

With the launch of the new Fiscal 50 website, Melissa looks forward to an ongoing relationship with Graphicacy as they continually refine the site and enhance the toolkit.

“The partnership between Graphicacy and Pew has leveraged everyone’s strengths,” she said. “We felt heard by Graphicacy throughout and were impressed with their willingness to learn our language and embrace the secret sauce that has made Fiscal 50 work so well over time, all while pushing us to do more than we’d imagined might be possible.”

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 Everytown for Gun Safety, the World Bank, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and many others.