Water For People Reveals Platform for Visual Nonprofit Reporting

On Aug. 28 at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Water For People revealed a prototype of a reporting platform that will help the organization manage, visualize, and reflect on data.

Water For People worked closely with the user experience agency, EffectiveUI, to develop a platform that will shift nonprofit reporting. The reporting platform is an online, interactive technology with visuals that represent data from a variety of sources.

"This platform creates empathy for global water and sanitation problems and transparency for donors in seeing where their money is going and how programs are progressing and being sustained over time," said Rebecca Flavin, CEO of EffectiveUI.

The reporting tool is designed to produce a visual snapshot, which will allow staff, partners, communities, donors, and the broader nonprofit community to see programmatic outcomes, challenges faced and future direction. Rather than focusing solely on the investments made, the platform will give both donors and organizations a more comprehensive view of what is happening in the field over time. 

“Traditional reporting methods have never allowed us to truly reflect on our work in its totality and subsequently improve as an organization,” explained Ned Breslin, CEO of Water For People. “We decided to tackle that problem head-on by unleashing the power of technology, visualization tools and other techniques that more accurately and transparently reflect how we learn.  We’re now at a critical tipping point for in-depth nonprofit reporting that can be creative, engaging, and thought-provoking.”

On Aug. 28, Breslin spoke at World Water Week in a session called “Judge Us by Our Outcomes” and gave attendees the first tour of the platform prototype, which will be available in early 2013.

“We are thrilled to launch the initial version of the reporting platform in Stockholm, with all of our programmatic and financial details linked to creative storytelling on strengths and challenges in the hopes that this platform will inspire dialogue and ideas to help us further improve,” said Breslin.