Visualizing the impact of political organizing during the COVID pandemic

Adjusting swiftly to today’s ever-changing landscape

The team at Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, came to Graphicacy as they faced the need to quickly pivot their entire political organizing model. The COVID pandemic caused them to have to rethink their Vote Gain Calculator application, which would now target 23 million battleground state voters with a hybrid in-person and digital organizing model.

Graphicacy’s team of skilled information designers and data visualization engineers worked to intuitively communicate the impact of this new hybrid organizing model, utilizing a combination of scrolling animations, interactive data visualization and live polling data from FiveThirtyEight. The final product allows users to explore and understand how Working America’s work in key battleground states will increase the share of the progressive vote, and propel Joe Biden and progressive Senate and gubernatorial candidates to victory in the 2020 election.

“The powerhouse Graphicacy team brings creativity, problem-solving smarts, and patience to every meeting and project. They helped us pivot to a whole new approach when the pandemic rendered our first data viz irrelevant and brought great ideas and energy to the project.” — Matt Morrison, Executive Director, Working America

One of the key deliverables of this project was the need to quickly explain to users the impact of Working America’s investments and unambiguously demonstrate their potential effect on the election outcomes.

Through an engaging, scrolling narrative, our team was able to lay out key points so that donors could quickly understand where Working America is having an impact in key battleground states:

To show the impact within each state, our team designed and built two different interactive views of how, with full investment, Working America’s campaign tactics have the potential to increase vote share and the number of votes.

Using polling data from FiveThirtyEight, our team also designed and built a horse-race view of the data, allowing users who are steeped in polling for the Presidential race to see live data and the potential impact that Working America’s program — digital and in-person — will have on the outcome of the election.

This project allowed the Graphicacy team to engage in what we do best: dig in with our client partners to examine complex data and then create data visualizations and visual narratives that are relevant, shareable and effective. The AFL-CIO’s new Vote Gain Calculator is an emblematic example of how Graphicacy partners with leading organizations to rapidly adapt to a global threat. Since the pandemic began, we have helped a host of clients with their critical digital transformations in light of the challenges that COVID-19 poses to politics, the economy, and the world at large, through tools such as the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Organizations need to adjust swiftly to today’s ever-changing landscape, and Graphicacy is here to guide our clients on that journey.

Graphicacy partners with clients to tell engaging stories with data. Graphicacy’s team combines storytelling, thoughtful human-centered design and deep technical capabilities to build and deploy strategic, data-rich digital projects. Graphicacy’s team has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the World Bank, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League and many others.