How to tell impactful stories with Mapbox
Non-profit organisations and charities that work with geographical data could very much benefit from live location platform, Mapbox. With dynamically updating data sets, beautifully designed and intuitive user interfaces, and multi-platform support, it’s an excellent tool to help your audiences make sense of your data and to demonstrate your organisation’s reach.
TLDR: If any of your organisation’s work includes geographical data, Mapbox could be a really useful service for you as a charity or non-profit. We’ll go into the benefits and why we use it in this post.
What is Mapbox and what does it do?
A live location platform, Mapbox provides tools and services that allow users to integrate maps, navigation and search functionality into their websites and applications. As well as having developer functionality, it’s also usable by non-coding users, meaning a strong technical knowledge isn’t automatically required.
“We started Mapbox because of how data and maps can shine a bright light on the hardest of problems, from disaster response to voter turnout. We get the best location tools into the hands of changemakers around the world.” – Eric Gundersen, Founder @ Mapbox
Mapbox first started their mapping projects supporting international development operations. This included working alongside partners such as the UN, World Bank, USAID and Doctors Without Borders.
“Bring location data to life with beautiful base maps, versatile upload and design tools, and cross-platform rendering. Mapbox helps build engaging maps that delight users and bring them back for more.” – Mapbox website
It’s an amazing tool for non-profit organisations and charities, particularly those that work with location-based or geographical data. It allows them to make use of performant mapping that integrates seamlessly within their website or app, with powerful rendering abilities that have short loading times, smooth transitions and polished 2D and 3D animations – all of which give audiences an excellent user experience.
Impressive features for understanding change and planning for the future
The maps Mapbox produces render dynamically and are fully functional, even when offline. There are also static maps available as images or UI’s for when interactive maps aren’t ideal for the situation. You can combine data from multiple sources; Mapbox can also produce comprehensive and accurate global data sets and map styles for you, as a ‘turnkey’ solution.
Data is continuously updated across all the maps on your site, ensuring coverage and accuracy. This is especially important if you’re using the mapping platform to monitor natural disasters, humanitarian crises or public health emergencies. Organisations can use Mapbox to understand and communicate special data about the past, present and future of particular groups. They can also analyse community impact and allocate resources depending on need, as the real time data updates ensure you’re able to understand when and where movement is occurring.
Displaying complex information with a data atlas
Charities and non-profit organisations can generate a lot of geographical data as part of their programmes – this is where a data atlas would be useful to display this data as maps to make it accessible to their users. We enable users to sort through this information quickly through implementing filters that alter the data displayed at any one time, as well as the ability to toggle between one or several of them.
To provide further information, summary details – such as stats, data and further information – can be shown as a small card pop-up that appears when a map pin is hovered over. If users select a particular region on the map, a slide-out panel could also offer more complex data.
Visualising data across geographic regions
Displaying regional data via a map is an excellent way to visualise data for users that would otherwise be difficult to consume and understand. It also allows them to compare the data across geographical regions. We use individual block colours to represent different values within the data (see screenshot 1 below for an example), or a colour gradient that allows regions to be compared by their position within a range (screenshot 2 below).
Highlighting specific location information
To highlight data from a specific location, map pins can be used to denote things such as organisation members, biodiversity initiatives or eye care clinics. These pins can also be designed to reflect an organisation’s brand, effectively tying it into the overall digital design, making it more cohesive. We do this often for our clients; we also create custom pins that allow us to identify a number of things, using different colours and icons to differentiate between them and make them visually appealing. In an area where there’s a large cluster of pins – particularly as you zoom out – we’ll group them together and display a number to show how many there are present in that one spot; if you zoom in, the number disappears and the individual pins reveal themselves, the further in you go.
Navigation and sign-posting
Mapbox’s interactive nature means you can implement a beautifully designed map as a navigation aid for your users, giving them the ability to click directly on it to take them to a specific country page containing further information – a great statement piece for the homepage of your website. We sometimes pair this option with a country dropdown selector to assist with countries that are difficult to select when not zoomed in.
Why we use Mapbox
We think Mapbox is a highly versatile tool for creating high quality and engaging maps. Not only does it give us control over the behaviour of the maps and how they display data, it also allows us to display data in a variety of ways and to align the design with our clients’ brands – this is less possible with other map generating competitors, such as Google Maps.
While we use Mapbox primarily from a development perspective, another excellent feature the tool offers is its online studio design interface – this is a non-coder option that users can produce maps with. It lets users pick from pre-designed templates, while still being able to tailor maps to use their own branding (e.g. fonts, colours, icons etc); these can then be published across platforms (Apple iOS/Mac OS, Android devices, the web etc).
We’ve used Mapbox for a number of our client’s projects, as it provides the option to have geographically heavy data resource libraries (such as in our Girls Not Brides atlas and Consortium for Street Children legal atlas), show locations (like in our Ecosystems Knowledge Network projects map and displaying the South West Fetal Medicine Centres), and supports navigation and sign-posting to regional data (for example, the IAPB Vision Atlas).
How Mapbox supports charities and non-profit organisations
Mapbox supports hundreds of non-profit organisations every year. They offer donated or discounted services that non-profits and charities can apply for consideration for twice yearly. They also give technical guidance and promotion, allowing organisations the chance to connect with their supporters, inform their operations and deliver their services more effectively through the engaging maps and location technologies that Mapbox provides.
“Our social and environmental responsibility extends beyond our immediate operational footprint. We are committed to leveraging the unique potential of our products, and the customers who build with them, to drive outsized positive impact for society.” – Peter Sirota, CEO at Mapbox
Conclusion
As demonstrated in this post, Mapbox has proved a useful resource for our clients, and allowed us to build eye-catching designs that aren’t just brand aware and graphically pleasing, but are able to showcase the data in an intuitive and knowledge-centred way. We’re pleased to be able to implement the tool in this way to assist our clients in demonstrating their progress to stakeholders, and dynamically providing up-to-date information for their users in an easily digestible manner. To discuss how we can help you implement maps, navigational and other location-based functionality into your website or application, why not get in touch?
