Visualizing Campaign Contributions

Rutgers University: Center for American Women and Politics / 2024 / Gender Equality, Politics & Government

The landing page of the project 'Women, Money, and Politics Watch 2024' provides convenient portals to the three core pages, along with information on when major data updates occur. It was designed by Graphicacy for Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics.

Overview

For Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) called on Graphicacy to help convey finance patterns for women candidates during the upcoming election with ongoing updates.

Launch Project

Services
CMS Integration
Data Visualization
Engineering
Interactive Web Applications
UX/UI Design

Background and Challenge:

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a public-facing organization based out of Rutgers University, examines the role of women and politics. During the 2024 election cycle, CAWP wanted to examine important questions about who gets campaign financing and where those contributions come from.

They partnered with Graphicacy to create Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024, a project that was notably different from their previous ones such as The Donor Gap, which Graphicacy also helped them create.

This was the first time that CAWP ran a research project during an election and focused on both congressional and state elections.

For Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024, CAWP needed Graphicacy to help them transform their vast data into a readily understandable record with succinct, meaningful points of entry that could be updated throughout the election cycle.

Opportunity and Solution:

The Graphicacy team focused on creating interactive opportunities for exploring the data in depth. They built an integrated environment of three web pages released incrementally:

The State View
The National View
Donor Gaps

The pages focus on campaign contributions for hundreds of women and men candidates in unique ways. A landing page provides convenient portals to the three core pages, along with information on when major data updates occur.

With the site running live during the current election cycle, CAWP also needed the ability to add, edit, and maintain the information on each page as elections continued and information changed, for a range of audiences including women’s organizations, activists, the media, and the general public.

To that end, the Graphicacy team helped CAWP make the best use of a CMS to update the data and analysis as the 2024 election unfolded.

Since the Donor Gap project featured a scrollytelling visual approach, Graphicacy strove to maintain the visual connection between the two CAWP projects as well. The team retained many of the successful visual elements from the Donor Gap report while adding innovative and engaging designs such as radial charts.