Ask the data on askyourdata.co

We have discussed various topics from the area of data science and analytics on our blog in the past months. Data visualization was focused on quite frequently (as we find it inspiring and fun ?). We for instance talked about the power of data visualization in our last blog post. We also mentioned Power BI, a state-of-the-art tool for data integration, analytics and visualization there. Power BI was released by Microsoft some years ago and is comparable to other well-know tools from the field like Tableau and Qlik.

On askyourdata.co, we constantly try to discuss possible applications of data science and analytics in the context of fundraising. Today’s communication mix and fundraising cannot be  imagined without the use of digital channels such as display advertising, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Optimization (SEO), social media as well as good old websites and blogs, to name just a few. Those “newer” channels (compared to more traditional ones such as direct mailing) bring new analytical and visualization possibilities about. We therefore decided to bring it all together and present a Power BI visualization showcase in this month’s blog post. Which data would have been more suitable for that than the one from our blog askyourdata.co?

So, voilà - our little showcase can be found below - we invite you to have a closer look! You can either use the navigation page or use arrows in the footer to browse the pages. The second page contains some hints on how to use the visualizations interactively. We embedded the showcase as iframe below, you can also access the original version using this link.

We have Google Analytics implemented on this site – which just requires some lines of additional HTML code. Google Analytics is one of the various services Google offers, it is for web analytics and allows tracking and reporting website traffic. Power BI allows accessing Google Analytics accounts trough its API. Google Analytics and add-on products such as Google Data Studio include data visualization features themselves. However, Power BI brings even broader possibilities and allows the integration of various data sources such as data from SQL servers (which many CRM systems and BI solutions are based upon) or tools like Adobe Analytics. It starts getting really interesting for analysts when data from the actual digital fundraising channels and CRM data that reflects supporter care and behaviour (typically from CRM or BI systems) are looked at in an integrated manner. This is a topic we plan to take discuss in-depth in one of our upcoming blog posts.

We used sessions to measure the traffic on this site. Amongst a general overview for sessions over time, we looked at where traffic has been coming from in terms of channels and locations. We were also interested in the devices (desktop, mobiles, tables) our readers use to visit askyourdata.co. Although our showcase is a simplified example, we think it gives an idea of the possibilities that modern visualization tools imply for both data from digital and "classic" channels.

As always, we appreciate your comments and feedback - and look forward to welcoming you again on our blog. We wish you a pleasant start into hopefully nice summer.