National Audubon Society & Drupal: Data Visualization for a Better World

Data is an important driver for numerous business and technical decisions, but making sense of it can be difficult. How do you bring complicated data from the world of statistics into the visual language of the 21st century?

In this session, the National Audubon Society and FFW will discuss our solution for gathering static, tabular information, and displaying it in Drupal in intuitive charts and maps. This session places a special focus on how data visualization is furthering The National Audubon Society’s mission of preserving valuable and critical natural resources and species.

Session attendees will learn about a blend of business, design, and technical strategies for data visualization. We’ll showcase how Drupal can be used to display huge amounts of dense data in a way that allows the average user to easily manipulate, filter, and intuitively interact with that complex information.

This 60-minute session is divided into three sections:

1. A breakdown of the business problems we experienced around unifying data that was previously buried in indecipherable charts on numerous conservation data source websites. We’ll discuss some of the challenges around deriving insights from such fragmented data, and how the new approach to data visualization has lead to direct improvements in user engagement and fundraising activities.
    
2. A detailed explanation of how The National Audubon Society and FFW designed a user-friendly way to share information about conservation efforts. We’ll talk about the user experience considerations around intuitively displaying complicated conservation data on landscapes and species, and how we put precise control of the data in the hands of the user – in a very tactile and intuitive way.
    
3. An overview of the technologies that underpin The National Audubon Society’s new data visualization displays. We’ll share how our mapping softwares and API integrations work with Drupal 7, and will answer questions on the technical challenges that we faced in creating this solution.

Who should come to this session?

We encourage people of all levels of Drupal expertise to attend this session, which will focus on the business, strategic, and marketing considerations of being able to visualize data in real time.