Visualising data

We've been thinking for a while about how Lamplight might be able to help you visualise and reflect on the data it produces in reports.  Tables of figures are all very well, and charts can help, but can sometimes be difficult to tell the whole picture.  Infographics (this is one of my favourites, at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net) can help to tell a fuller story.

We're not claiming the beauty of some of the best infographics, and this is just a first effort at helping to make sense of the data that's there (a 'straightforward' Lamplight outcomes report generates up to 18 different statistics for each outcome measure).  Perhaps some of the 'beauty' of this is that Lamplight generates this in one click from your standard reports...

In the first part, the background bar is scaled to the minimum and maximum possible values for the measure, and the arrow shows the average start and average end scores for all our service users (of course this is fictional data).  The second chart shows some distribution: the width of the arrows is proportional to the number of people that saw positive or negative (or no) change; the height is proportional to the amount of change they saw (on average).

We'd be really interested to hear feedback on whether this helps, and what other measures and graphics might also be useful.

Charities Evaluation Service - new review of IT systems

Charities Evaluation Service have just published an ICT overview document helping voluntary organisations that are thinking about using a system to help with their monitoring and evaluation.

There's some useful advice about how to approach this, questions to ask, resources you'll need.

We're also pleased to come out really well!  Fourteen different systems have been reviewed independently and Lamplight was (joint) highest ranked - and all but one of the others cost much more!  So Lamplight gets you as much as the more expensive systems out there.

This is the first time that we're aware of that there's been an attempt to assess and compare different systems.  Up til now we fairly frequently get asked "who are your competitors and why are you better" - which is always a curious question to be asked!  So we're sure that this independent review will help organisations choosing a system.

(A bit more detail on the comparison: systems were ranked high, medium or low on flexibility, outcomes management, data security, and support.  Six of the 14 systems scored 3-high 1-medium, including Lamplight.  Twelve of those fourteen systems are in the 'medium' or 'high' cost bands.  Lamplight also has the second-shortest contract length at 3 months.  The research was carried out during Autumn 2010.)

The comparison document is here.

Bexley Snap join the Lamplight family

We don't often make much of a public fuss when an organisation starts using Lamplight - so it's nice of the organisation (Bexley SNAP) and NCVO to do so for us!  We're (obviously) really pleased that they chose Lamplight and are really looking forward to working with them...

YUI Datatable statistics

Lamplight uses the YAHOO User Interface   a lot, especially datatables.  One of the things they lack, though, are footer statistics - up to now we've generated them on the server.  But to cope with editable datatables, we needed a dynamic version, so here it is on the YUI blog, with links to github for a demo and source.  And they'll be in Lamplight in the next week or two too!