Leaders and managers at public and nonprofit organizations are increasingly tasked with designing and implementing performance management systems that regularly track organizational inputs, outputs, and outcomes. Implementing these systems—including communicating organizational structure and mission, tracking and benchmarking program outcomes, and synthesizing feedback from both staff and the public—requires effective communication, especially of complex data. In this course, you will learn 1) data and graphic design principles and 2) the technical knowledge to create accurate, clear, and powerful data visualizations that can be implemented in a public organization’s performance management system.
This will be a hands-on course that will allow you to use real-world public administration and policymaking data to create your own visualizations. The course will focus on the theoretical foundations of public management issues and expose you to good data visualization and design principles. Your time will also be dedicated to learning the nuts and bolts of creating data visualizations, doing so mostly using R, an open-source programming language increasingly used by social scientists and policy professionals to analyze and visualize data and communicate it in reports and interactive websites. The major assignments in the course will be in-class data visualization exercises and a data visualization portfolio, using real case studies and data, that includes both static visualizations created throughout the semester and a final interactive report or dashboard.