CHARITY in the
School of Business
DATA
VIZ
University of Texas at Austin | Data Storytelling | Spring 2021
Client
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Problem
In preparation for renovation, the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas at Austin decided to remove the thousands of endowment plaques from their current building's walls and make their information available in a digital form. This digital display will continue to recognize endowments and their donors most likely through an interactive kiosk with a corresponding website.
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Project Goal
The endeavor is still in its infancy, so my contribution to this project was to meet two main goals:
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To explore how best to organize the endowment information
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To explore how best to display the endowment information
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The Data
The data related to these endowments include such items as the endowment name, the type of endowment, the type of donor and donor gender, location data, the Board of Regents approval date, links to the endowment Legacy pages, the endowment donation amounts, and more. Sara Jebaily, the Assistant Director of Stewardship for McCombs Business School, compiled the majority of the data from the databases at her disposal, while also including “dummy data” for several fields that are either not yet accessible (Scholarship recipients, Legacy links) or sensitive information (Principal name, Principal EID, Endowment amount).
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The enrollment data was accessed and compiled from the UT Statistical Handbooks at https://reports.utexas.edu/statistical-handbook.
A few milestone dates for the business school were also found at https://bba100.mccombs.utexas.edu/our-legacy/bba-timeline/ and https://bba100.mccombs.utexas.edu/our-legacy/bba-timeline/.
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Audience
The intended audience for this project will span multiple parties: it is intended to reassure the donors that their endowment information will remain visible and easily accessible, even though the physical plaques will be taken down from the walls; it will be a resource for scholarship recipients to view information about their benefactors; it is also meant to provide information for potential donors to reference before making donations, themselves; and, finally, the hope is that the interface will be useful and easily browsable by any member of the public interested in the business school’s endowments. In addition, it is my hope that this project will also be useful internally to the business school’s stewardship and giving staff as a way to better visualize and track McCombs endowments.
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Tools
Tableau Desktop
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Design Requirements
The business school aims to eventually create a kiosk-version of this display with an accompanying website; the current project, though, is meant as just the first step in that direction: it should give them a better understanding of the ways in which the endowment data can be displayed and organized, as well as give them a solid foundation from which to build their future kiosk-version.
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There was quite a bit of leeway in how this project developed, but there were a number of required elements. Each individual endowment, along with at least its donor, needed to be searchable in the display, to maintain donor recognition. Various endowment types, subtypes, and donor types needed to be recognized somewhere, as well. Ideally, there needed to be a way to incorporate donor/endowment stories in some way in the future (though this will occur later, as these stories are not yet available). Finally, it also had to be possible to continue adding endowment data to the spreadsheet over time as more endowments are created.
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Solution
The project evolved from a single dashboard into a Tableau story, so as to separate different charts that aim to answer different search questions. It begins with a jittered time series of every single endowment filterable by almost any relevant variable, so that a viewer looking for a specific endowment will be able to quickly and easily hone in on it. The next screen breaks the endowment categories down by type and subtype, the next by donor and donor type, and the next screen displays total endowments by location filterable by donor type. The final two screens plot all recorded endowment recipients and close with information to support further exploration. The aim here was to give both explorers and searchers any search options they might need.
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The Exploration Experience
The intent behind this display was to provide many flexible avenues by which a viewer might search for a specific endowment, investigate an endowment type, or simply explore the overall endowment information and trends. While the various filter and chart-swap options allow for great flexibility, they also increase the charts' complexity, so explanatory overlays were placed over each dashboard.
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The first “chapter” of the story plots individual endowments by various categories over time or by amount, allowing for in-depth exploration.
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The second chapter, “The Numbers,” allows for exploration of endowment types over time, again, but this time as a sum of endowments, rather than individual endowments.
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“Donations,” the third chapter, highlights donation (dollar) amounts over time, for those who are interested in the total amount of money donated to different areas over time.
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The next chapter, “Donors,” details specifics about donor endowment donations, from the total number of donations, their types & subtypes, the donor type categorization corresponding to that donor, as well as the titles of each individual endowment created by each donor.
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“Origins” maps out the states in which donors lived at the time of an endowment’s creation according to several different categorization options.
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The “Recipients” chapter displays a unit chart plotting every endowment with a recorded recipient over time, for those who wish to find an endowment according to a recipient name.
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Finally, “Learn More” is the chapter meant to act as a jump-off point for those who want to find more information about endowments, whether by visiting web resources or by contacting relevant business school staff.
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Process Details
Click an option to navigate to its information below:​
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View Options
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Brief video demonstration coming soon!
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Embedded interactive version viewable by those with Tableau Server or Online accounts
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Page on Tableau Public (will open in a new window).​
Visual Encoding Choices
CHART TYPES
Each chart type was chosen with the varied target audience in mind; while most interactions with the display are expected to be exploratory, some viewers will come with a specific target in mind, and others will be more interested in a broader understanding. Thus, all charts are filterable in some way for ease of search, and some display information down to the granularity of the individual endowment, while others show overall trends. Most of the dashboards also have multiple sheet swappers to display the charts according to different categorical breakdowns, for the same reason.
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COLORS
This particular color scheme is a subset of the McCombs and University of Texas at Austin official color palettes, and was chosen to maintain a strong, cohesive school spirit and image.
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LAYOUT
Many viewers of this display are likely to come to it with only a small amount of information—just the title, the donor, the year, or a recipient name—but still hoping to locate a specific endowment, so incorporating multiple dashboards into a story made it much more feasible to support all of these different potential searches.
Data Transformation & Cleaning
The data provided by the office of Stewardship and Donor Relations was quite serviceable from the start, but there were a few fields I had to transform to make them more usable. The Board of Regents Approval Date, for example, started as a full date, and I wanted just the year, in some cases. So, I used a calculated field with “DATEPART” to attain that.
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There was also a field labeled “GRAD YEAR” that combined the year of graduation with the degree achieved in parentheses. I used the “LEFT,” “RIGHT,” and “SEARCH” functions in Excel to create two new columns that separate these two bits of information.
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I also compiled enrollment information on the business school starting in 1980 by working my way through the UT Statistical Handbooks for each year to find the enrollment numbers. Once in spreadsheet format, though, this data was simple to use.