Causes.com Community Report - Visualizing a Year of Digital Civic Engagement
The Causes Community report is a data-driven exploration of how people engage with news and take action on Causes.com. Working at the intersection of data analysis and visual design, I transformed platform analytics into an engaging narrative about digital civic participation in 2023.
Design Philosophy & Visual Narrative
The design challenge was to make complex engagement data accessible to a public audience while capturing the intensity of 2023's news cycle. I developed a distinctive visual language using duotone imagery of the year's notable figures—from Biden's optimistic thumbs-up to Grimace's viral moment—set against a stark black background. This newspaper-inspired treatment created a powerful cover that immediately communicates both the chaos and importance of the year's events.
Data Storytelling Through Design
The core of this project was finding and visualizing the stories hidden in Causes.com's user data. Working closely with marketing, I:
- Developed innovative ways to visualize user engagement with the platform's micro-surveys, mirroring the actual UI elements users interact with in the wild
- Created a 3D visualization in Blender to show engagement across news categories over time, allowing viewers to see trends that would be obscured in a traditional 2D graph
- Designed data visualizations that connected raw metrics to real-world events and user behaviors
Interactive Elements & Engagement
One of our key challenges was showcasing how users progress from passive reading to active participation. I designed visualizations that:
- Mapped the relationship between article content and user actions
- Showed engagement patterns across different news categories
- Illustrated how Causes.com's unique micro-survey features drive user participation
Cross-Functional Collaboration
This project demonstrated the power of iterative collaboration between data and marketing teams. While exploring the platform's analytics, I identified compelling data stories that helped shape the marketing narrative, which in turn informed which metrics we chose to highlight and how we visualized them.
The result was a cohesive report that tells the story of Causes.com's community through both numbers and narrative, helping stakeholders understand not just how many people use the platform, but how they use it to engage with the most important issues of 2023.