Data Visualizations for Story Telling: How the Mercy Corps Ukraine Humanitarian Response team enables shared story telling through dashboards

Over the last year the Mercy Corps humanitarian response team has supported over 100,000 individuals inside Ukraine with multiple means of humanitarian assistance. A large propentent of their programming is multi-purpose cash assistance (MPCA), delivered twice a month and the response data needs are high, with many partners and team members working remotely, contextualizing data through storytelling and visualizations is essential.

The team utilizes several different Microsoft Power Bi dashboards to shape the context of the humanitarian action from granular enumerator monitoring, through the verification process, post distribution monitoring, to country level aggregation targets vs actuals. This has involved the use of several different technologies including a data collection platform, scripts for cleaning, tentative steps towards cloud storage and dashboards for analysis and storytelling. Whilst there have been great successes, we are also here to discuss and share the challenges and lessons learnt of scaling up visual storytelling in emergencies.