Resources
Below are some of the resources I've found helpful for building organizational capacity.
Data Visualization
Want some tips/tricks or some inspiration? Here are some of my favorites.
Presenting Data Effectively by Stephanie Evergreen.
Why I love it: This was the first book I read as I sought to improve my data visualization skills. One of the big takeaways for me was that good data visualization leverages unconscious cognitive functions to enhance meaning. Bad data visualizations increase a viewer's cognitive load to the point where meaning becomes unclear. Evergreen does a great job of accessibly breaking down this connection. The book also includes some checklists to help you assess your data visualizations for
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Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Why I love it: Nussbaumer Knaflic's book is similar to Evergreen's. While she doesn't get as deeply into the psychology of data visualization, she focuses more on story arcs and strategy of data visualization. Nussbaumer Knaflic also has a blog which hosts monthly data visualization makeover challenges that anyone can participate in.
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Why I love it: Tableau Public is a free version of the popular data visualization software, Tableau. Anybody can use it and create a dashboard. All dashboards are saved publicly, which means you can see some of the cool ways people are experimenting with Tableau. Tableau curates some of the best ones in their Viz of the day collection
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Why I love it: Just like Tableau's Viz of the Day, anybody can post and contribute. You can see visualizations created using lots of different tools. The nice part is that there's a whole range of complexity. Some are made with simple Excel functionality while others have a lot of animations.
College Enrollment, Persistence, and Completion
I've spent the majority of my career looking at college enrollment, persistence, and completion stats. Here are some of my go-to sources.
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC)
What it is: The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) collects data college enrollment data from colleges across the country. With direct access to student enrollment data, they're really well positioned to publish high quality analyses of nationwide trends in high eduction. This has been my go-to source for comparison statistics I use to contextualize college enrollment, persistence, and completion statistics. They publish a lot of the same reports annually which allows for longitudinal comparisons. ​Click here for the most recent publications
Pell Report
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Regional Comparison Statistics
The organizations I have worked for have helped send students to college in ten states. To put our impact in perspective, we would turn to cities and state reporting agencies to find out how similar schools were performing. This document (coming soon) summarizes where the available data for each of those states and cities, where available.
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Organizational Health and Employee Satisfaction
Section under construction
I have run employee satisfaction surveys for several organizations. Here are some resources I have found helpful.
Other Books
Just some good stuff I've read that's influenced the way I approach my work
Section under construction
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Atomic Habits by James Clear
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Growing up at Work by Yael Sivi
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Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
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Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It by Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik
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Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
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