Flourish

Flourish is a powerful and flexible platform for quickly and efficiently producing high-quality interactive content, including data visualisations, maps and explainers. It was created by the cofounders of multi-award-winning interactive studio Kiln.digital based on years of experience working for newsrooms and others. The Global Editors Network asked us a few questions for their Startups For News competition, ahead of the first pitch battle we will be taking part in this week. If you would like to vote for Flourish, you can do it here.

GEN: What problem are you solving?

Flourish: Interactive content is inefficient to produce in large newsrooms and out of reach for smaller newsrooms. Non-coding journalists usually cannot produce anything (except perhaps a simple chart) without developer help, which is often not available. In addition, developers write too much code that gets used once and thrown away. Some newsrooms have started developing in-house tools to solve these problems but they are usually very limited.

GEN: What is the solution you are offering?

Flourish: Flourish makes it quick and easy for non-coders to produce and publish high-quality interactive visuals, stories and interactives based on flexible and powerful templates. In a few seconds, a journalist can turn a spreadsheet of data into a powerful visualisation, and in a few minutes they can create a structured animated story. Some templates come with the system, but crucially newsroom developers can also produce their own templates for in-house use or for sharing with the world. An open-source developer community will also contribute more templates over time.

GEN: List 3 reasons why you are better than your competitors

Flourish: There are no exact competitors, but compared to projects in a similar space Flourish is better because:

1. It is uniquely powerful and flexible, capable of producing any kind of outputs, from a WebGL globe visual to an image gallery.
2. It is designed for storytelling, allowing efficient authoring of step-by-step explainers, presentations, audio-led Talkies and (in the future) videos.
3. It provides a “full” solution, including template SDK for developers, easy-to-use editor and publishing system for journalists, and full organisational controls for administrators.

GEN: How does your company make money?

Flourish: We will make money selling the platform to corporates, including associated services such as data storage and database connectors.

GEN: What are your next steps?

Flourish: We launched to developers in March to kickstart widespread template production. In the coming months we will do a full public launch where non-coders can sign up and immediately start using Flourish, though we already have trials running in various newsrooms and other organisations. After the public launch we will focus on new features such as database connectors and video exports.

In the News

Backed by LocalGlobe, London-based Flourish launches data visualisation platform

We brought a bunch of data journalists together into a room and this is what happened

If you would like to vote for Flourish, you can do it here.