What Is the Role of Data Viz in the Movement to Stop the Climate Crisis?
An interview with the Sunrise Movement’s data and design teams about harnessing data visualization to advocate for just climate policy
Welcome to Earth Week on Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society. In honor of Earth Day on April 22, we are publishing earth-related data-visualization content all week. Data viz can enhance our appreciation of the planet, illuminate our relationship to it, and call us to action to preserve it. After all, we only have one and it means the world to us. You can keep up with all of our Earth Week articles here.
The Sunrise Movement is a Political Action Committee comprised of young individuals with the goal to make climate change an urgent priority for lawmakers. The group is making youth voices from around the country heard and changing public opinion — one graphic and data visualization at a time. As a part of our week of coverage celebrating Earth Day, we interviewed members of their data and design teams to learn more about the role of data in the movement, their design process, and how their work has changed over time.
Rachel Schragis (RS): Creative Organizing Manager
Josh Yoder (JY): Visual Strategy Lead
Brittany Bennett (BB): Data Director
Why is the Sunrise Movement meaningful to you?
Rachel Schragis (Creative Organizing Manager): As the creative organizing manager at Sunrise, my job is to help make sure members of Sunrise can get trained up in the skills they need to make their creative skills — art, design, video, photography — part of their organizing. In the past two years, I’ve met literally hundreds of powerful, visionary young people who were not organizers before they joined Sunrise — and now, they’re in it for life. Sunrise is a project where people’s lives are changed in service of the societal transformation we all need and deserve — it’s deeply moving and gives me something concretely hopeful to hold on to, on all the hard days right now.
Josh Yoder (Visual Strategy Lead): In Sunrise, you ground yourself in deep personal storytelling. But when we take action, we move together and we move to win. Our stats and metrics are grounded in individual stories. But when dozens of mass actions erupt across the country, it’s clear that we are a unified wave.
What is the role of data in the Sunrise Movement?
Brittany Bennett (Data Director): As the data director of the Sunrise Movement, I answer the question: Are we winning? I leverage the insights from data to assess if we are on track to build the people and political power to pass a Green New Deal. This can look like everything from determining which subject line on our rapid response fundraising email performs best to which phone banking scripts lead to a significant increase in turnout to how our organizing programs are building powerful, grassroots leaders.
What role does data visualization/design play in pushing for new policies?
JY: Our role is to make the broad support for the Green New Deal policies visible. We ground people in moral clarity through storytelling. A lot of environmental movements believed that if enough people just knew more stats they’d take action—and that clearly hasn’t worked. We still use infographics, but we recruit with storytelling.
Data visualization is such a huge tool Sunrise uses to understand how we build power.
Can you walk us through your design process when creating your designs and data visualizations?
BB: The most common question I get is “Can you make us a dashboard?” And while I can make any data visualization under the sun, it would be useless until they answer the question, “What is the change you are trying to create in the world?” When I do data visualization at Sunrise, most of the work occurs before I even open my script. I spend time meeting with program leads, directors, and staff to get to the heart of what information they need from the data visualization. I start by working with key staff on what their programmatic goals are, then how they know when they have achieved them, then what data are available to us to measure success along the way. By the time I sit down to write my code I’ve done all the hard work. On the tech side of things, I’m lucky to have a powerful CRM that syncs to our data warehouse (Civis), and from there I can make dynamic dashboards in Periscope. My one-off visualizations and any kind of spatial mapping is done in Python with a slew of packages, including Seaborn, Plotly, and GeoPandas.
What are the Sunrise Movement’s design principles and how did they come about?
JY: We are a decentralized movement that draws power from disciplined unity. It has to be replicable without having to read the style guide. We have to make you believe in the design principles, without reading the style guide. Which, as a designer, is utterly terrifying.
Visually, we focus on loosely unified color, commitment to discipline, and leading with personal stories. Color is the most obvious Sunrise characteristic, but it’s actually the discipline and attention to detail that defines our design.
What does your team think the difference in effectiveness between graphics/data visualizations and pamphlets/writings/written word?
BB: My data visualizations are primarily made to be seen by other staff at Sunrise. It is far, far easier to show a program lead a graph showing a huge spike in registrations to one of our programs than it is to write out the number increase in an email. In half a second the program lead can see multiple insights at once: This spike has never occurred before in recent history, it’s significantly more people than has been the trend, it happened in a short amount of time, and so on.
RS: To echo Brittney, data visualization is such a huge tool Sunrise uses to understand how we build power. I see us use it in staff strategy conversations, and also in trainings. (Quote from a mass training last week: “Here we are again with our old friend, the spectrum of allies …” and everyone laughs because we talk about that chart so often!) But when we speak to the public (and Sunrise’s ultimate goal is always to target the public) we turn our understanding of that data into a narrative that people can follow along and hear themselves in — be that written or spoken.
Are there any other movements/publications/designers that have been an influence on the designs for the Sunrise Movement?
BB: I am constantly inspired by my colleagues at Data for Progress.
JY: The original brand design was done by Josiah Werning, who’s done brand designs for several Momentum networks. A lot of Sunrise’s tactical distinctiveness comes from him. On the creative side, we’ve been heavily influenced by the way both Bernie campaigns used storytelling to contextualize data about our society.
What challenges do you face in creating your graphics and visualizations?
JY: There’s a real lack of visual symbols that convey a just transition. Realistically, most climate jobs are in care work and service work, not construction. But, our recognizable “job” symbols are hammers and wrenches. That’s a problem for our labor partners. Similarly, windmills and solar panels signal technocratic solutions. That technology will solve a crisis that actually needs deep economic and racial justice reforms. The classic environmentalist image is an idyllic natural landscape with wind turbines, or a shiny clean city with new rail lines. It’s very difficult to commit to fighting gentrification or indigenous erasure with those images.
How have the Sunrise Movement’s design goals changed and shifted over time?
RS: Earlier in Sunrise Movement, the top goal of our design work was to convey the power of the collective moral clarity of our youth movement — to basically say: We exist, we’re powerful, listen to us. We conveyed this through slogans like “Our time to Lead” and “For the air we breathe, for the water we drink, for the places we call home.” How do we show that we’re part of a movement larger than Sunrise? As we’ve grown in power, we have to communicate a lot more complicated of a story, and we’ve come up against the problems Josh named about visualizing the just transition in a big way. How do we convey our commitment to collective liberation, to economic justice as a facet of climate justice?
What feedback have you received from politicians, supporters and the Sunrise Movement’s opponents regarding your designs and advertisements?
RS: When I lead trainings, sunrise members around the country tell me that it’s the look of the movement that first drew them in—the sharpness and the freshness that comes across in the combination of our staging, our design work and the construction of our videos. What’s interesting is that the same young people are then super surprised by how much intention, research, and planning goes into making those choices that they found compelling! The fun part is that then we train young people to replicate and build on our successes … so that they can make even fresher, sharper imagery and videos — and that’s part of how our movement grows.
You can learn more about the Sunrise Movement by visiting its website or by following its Facebook page.
