Dashboard as Philanthropy
Student Practice of Goodness as Close to Real Life as Possible!
I work in a highly practical and profit-oriented field — dashboard implementation! However, I also engage in teaching and strive to assist aspiring professionals by offering free internships, sharing knowledge…
Another non-commercial aspect of our work that I take pride in is guiding my students to create free dashboards for charitable organizations under my supervision!
For them, it’s a case close to reality, and for the client, it’s something they might not have been able to afford otherwise, buried in piles of tables and reports… Some of these organizations later hired these students.
So, everyone benefits:
- Students gain a case study and practical experience
- I have content and interesting cases, plus trained students
- The charities receive structured data and convenient reports, as well as contacts with experts in the field
I want to tell you about several such projects and their specifics. Surprisingly, the process of creating a paid project differs not so much from a free one, and we still face the same problems and challenges here! However, when have students ever had it easy? But what a good deed is done!
To make sure that these dashboards are not only beautiful but also useful, I teach students how to gather data according to my Napkin Technical Specifications.
Where do charitable foundations get and spend their money?
This is the question on many donors’ minds. Therefore, it’s important for foundations to demonstrate that all their reporting is transparent, and the money goes towards a good cause rather than someone’s pocket or drowning in bureaucracy!
Our great students: Ekaterina Stushkova, Ksenia Ubamzaorva, Kirill Artemov created this beautiful dashboard for the “AiF. Kind Heart” Foundation.
The foundation was established by the “Arguments and Facts” weekly newspaper in 2005 to provide targeted assistance to readers. The foundation’s history began with the tragedy at the Beslan school and the thousands of people who came to help. For the past 15 years, the foundation has been rewriting human destinies.
What the dashboard tells us about:
The goal of the dashboard is to show the volumes of donations. The structure of donations is creatively presented on the cover.
This dashboard will fit perfectly into the design of the website and will serve as a motivator for the foundation’s supporters.
We often receive feedback from charitable foundations after such projects — it’s very gratifying and motivates both the students and me to continue this type of activity!
The necessary information is literally gathered on one screen. Previously, we spent time manually building charts and diagrams, but now we can see them in just a few slides in the created dashboard.
- Yevgeny Donskikh,
Director of the AiF Kind Heart Charity Foundation
Who does the charitable foundation help?
A good example is a dashboard made by our students Varvara Blinova and Anastasia Dronova for the “Love and Gratitude” Foundation from Yekaterinburg.
What the dashboard tells us about:
The goal of the dashboard is to show the results of the foundation’s financial and social activities.
The first page is a classic financial report with income and expenditure sections. At the top are cards displaying key indicators of income, followed by a breakdown of their structure. Here, we see the main channels from which funds are received.
Of course, the dashboard is interactive, so there is the possibility to get detailed information on a specific direction by highlighting a column or sector of the diagram. On the right side, expenses are detailed, with a large portion going towards food, packaging, volunteer wages, and taxes.
The foundation helps pensioners, homeless people, and large families. Every day, volunteers feed about 300 people with hot meals. They don’t limit themselves to food — they gather children for school, provide counseling, hairdressing services, and distribute humanitarian aid kits.
We had such an amazing experience!
We already have over a dozen similar projects, and I hope that in the future there will be even more! I’ll try to provide more detailed information about them!
It’s rewarding to do good and bring benefits to all participants in this activity! I hope that similar practices in the data community will become more widespread because NGOs don’t always have expensive data specialists. And data inundate all spheres of life in our age!
You can read about other directions of our activities for the past year in this article: From Data Visualization Award to the Journal.
For example, on May 10–11, 2024, we will host a free conference on data visualization and business intelligence — Make Your Data Speak Conference 2024, featuring excellent speakers! I hope that such events will make it easier for people to enter the profession and improve even more lives!
