Visualizing Campaign Contributions

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) called on Graphicacy to help convey finance patterns for women candidates during the upcoming election and reach a broader audience.

During the 2024 election cycle, who gets campaign financing and from where? Those are some of the crucial questions that the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) plans to answer with Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024.

CAWP, a public-facing organization based out of Rutgers University, examines the role of women and politics. This money and politics project is different from their previous ones such as The Donor Gap.

“This is the first time we are running this research project during the election,” said Kira Sanbonmatsu, CAWP Senior Scholar and Professor of Political Science at Rutgers. “Our past research in this area has been postelection.” For the new website, CAWP is also focusing on congressional as well as state elections.

One thing that remained the same from The Donor Gap project: their partnership with Graphicacy. For Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024, Graphicacy helped CAWP transform their data into a readily understandable record with succinct, meaningful points of entry that could be updated throughout the election.

“We were really fortunate to work with Graphicacy again,” Kira said.

Extensive Data, Novel Approach

When CAWP approached Graphicacy about working on the Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 project, they “had unlimited data that we wanted to distill down, to make usable and not overwhelming,” Kira said.

“While the Donor Gap featured some of our scrollytelling visual approach, the goal this time was to create interactive opportunities for people to really dig into the data,” said Rebecca Lamm, Data Visualization & UI Designer for Graphicacy. “It’s more exploratory.”

Graphicacy built an integrated environment of three web pages released incrementally — the first page going live in early 2024, the next in April, and the third in August:

• The State View
• The National View
• Donor Gaps

The pages focus on campaign contributions for hundreds of women and men candidates. The State View takes a deep dive into campaign contributions for state and congressional races in 10 states. The National View page showcases the congressional elections in all 50 states, while the Donor Gaps page will analyze the demographics of both state and national donors. A landing page provides convenient portals to the three core pages along with information on when major data updates occur.

Solving for On-demand Updates

Since the site is live during the current election cycle, CAWP also needed the ability to add, edit, and maintain the information on each page as elections continued and information changed.

“We didn’t know where the data points would land in this project. There was also some uncertainty about when we would have the data and be ready to launch the various phases of the project,” Kira said.

At the same time, CAWP needed to have the pages built so they could publish analyses as quickly as possible, for a range of audiences including women’s organizations, activists, the media, and the general public.

“Graphicacy played an essential role, from start to finish, in helping us make our research accessible and share it in a timely fashion,” Kira said.

To that end, the Graphicacy team helped CAWP make the best use of a CMS to update the data and analysis as the 2024 election unfolded. “They’ve shown us how to make the data accessible and shareable in an ongoing way, and they’ve been flexible about our evolving timeline.”

Bridging the Gap

Though the nature of Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 differs from The Donor Gap, CAWP and Graphicacy wanted to maintain the connection between the two projects. Women, Money, & Politics “creates a clear visual throughline from The Donor Gap,” Rebecca noted.

“As in the previous project, Graphicacy designed beautiful pages and visualizations that encourage people to interact with the data,” Kira said. “The design retains many of the successful elements from the Donor Gap report.”

It also adds innovative elements such as radial charts, which are a favorite across the Graphicacy and CAWP teams and “showcase the data points in a powerful way,” Kira said.

“You don’t see radial charts often,” said Sarah Hodges, Graphicacy’s Senior Data Visualization Engineer. “But they pull you in with an interesting view of the data.”

Disclosing the State of Campaign Giving

The goal of Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 is “to elevate the opportunities and challenges women face in the campaign finance arena,” Kira said. By partnering with Graphicacy, CAWP was able to provide “a resource to understand where women are succeeding, where they’re facing obstacles, and how that varies across categories like party and candidate race.”

“It’s underappreciated how much men dominate political giving,” she continued. “We want women to see where they can give to candidates and make their voices heard.”

Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 “reflects the complexity of the topic across the country,” said Jeffrey Osborn, Graphicacy’s Creative Director, Visual Storytelling. The site “provides relevant data that can inform decision-making and propel women into a parity position in politics.”

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 Bank, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and many others.