2014 Campaign Contributions

Went to fec.gov and downloaded Candidates and Campaign Contributions for the 2014 Election.  The Individual file was too large so I just did the Committee file.  Just started building it, but wanted to post it as I build it.  First map refers to the Candidate Volume, the Map below it is total contributions based on the location of the contributor.  So  you can quickly see where a candidates dollars are coming from.  Scroll down to see contributions by month.  Everything is a filter.

If you're not familiar with interacting with interactive reports, I'm putting together a step-by-step on how to use the report.

So I just prepped the data and got it up here, not sure where it's going to end up.  This is very much in the discovery phase, not sure if there's enough once you select a team for a significant sample size, so I may change to summarized visuals.  For now it's starter histograms and scatter plots for possible regression builds.  Still playing around, but wanted to get the dashboard up.

I've got everything set up as a filter for now, so you can pick a team/conference, an opposing conference and whatever filters you want then review results below.

Here's the Dashboard I ended up with.  This is an example of what a Discovery Dashboard could look like.  It's not meant for SLT, but Analysts or Subject Matter Experts (SME) within the business.  It focuses on Enrollment, Math/Reading Proficiency and Average Teachers Experience and Salary.  While I have the entire state, I created a Set of only Des Moines schools so things wouldn't get too busy for the PoC.  To see how I got there, scroll down further to see some of my notes and thoughts.

So I currently live in Des Moines Iowa.  I have 2 kids and the oldest is reaching the age to start going to school.  I decided to take a look at what data was available to the public for Iowa Schools.  There is a lot.  

While there are a million different ways I could go, I decided to focus on 3 areas to start: Teachers, Enrollment and Performance.

I downloaded all these areas going back to 2005.  Had to do some prepping as formats weren’t always consistent every year and some elements didn’t get reported on till later.

I decided to focus on districts that are on the west side of Des Moines.  This includes: Johnston, Urbandale, Waukee and West Des Moines.

Why? Waukee is a major growth market so I thought I'd compare Waukee and it's more densly populated neighbors.

So since it's Waukee's growth that sparked the curiosity, let's start with Enrollment. 

Pretty clear to see that Waukee is growing.  From 2005 - 2014 Waukee Enrollment has increased 94%.  What's overshadowed a bit in this chart is that Johnstons growth is 28%, which is impressive.

What did suprise me is how flat West Des Moines and Urbandale have been over the past 10 years: 4% and 7% respectivley.

So the next thing I wanted to take a look at was enrollment by Grade Level.  There's 2 ways to look at this: By Year or By Grade, so I decided to post both.

Let's first look at Waukee.

It's easy to see the 'block' getting bigger with each passing year, but it's interesting for someone not familiar with the industry to see the peak grades are in the earlier years, with pre-school being the exception as that little blip on the left of each year.

So what happens if we flip this from Grade by Year to Year by Grade?

As we saw in the previous chart, this shows those early year peaks and it's much easier to see how each grade level is increasing (for the most part) year over year.

So how do the other 3 districts compare with Waukee?  Instead of unpacking each one here, I decided to stack them on top of each other.  Applying both types; Grade by Year and Year by Grade.

From what we saw earlier, Urbandale and West Des Moines sit pretty flat, but you can see Waukee's (grey) KG-6th grade creep up each year, eventually overcomming West Des Moines towards the end.

Now lets flip it to look at each grade level year over year.

Same data, much different outlook.

You can see right away how Waukee is going to have a high school issue in about 5 years.  Waukee KG-5th is the highest of the 4 in 2014  What I found kind of interesting here is how each grade level for Urbandale is consistantly around the 300 mark.  It is a very flat district.  Even West Des Moines, whom we saw earlier has an overall flat growth over the past 10 years, does have a bit of volitility in each grade year over year.

So, at a high level, our quick take aways are:

• Waukee is growing very rapidly, espeically in the early grade years which will eventually impact the high school years.  
• Johnston is growing as well, but there's isn't dominated by any grade level like Waukee, Johnston has consistent growth across all grade levels.
• West Des Moines and Urbandale are flat compared to their neighboring districts.  Suprising to me was how small the enrollment level was for Urbandale, given its location in the area next to these other districts. Maybe Urbandale skews more to empty nesters than families.

So next, I thought we'd take a look at Performance.  Performance appears to be broken out into 2 categories: Math and Reading. So let's take a look at both.

It's a good start to show us a bit of movement from grade to grade.  There's an interesting dip at 6th grade for both Math and Reading.  Wonder if there was a bad year that brought it down.  So I wanted to take a look at each year for each grade to see if there's a trend up or down from 2010.

It's easy to see here, especially for West Des Moines and Urbandale, the dip in 6th grade.  There's a lot that stands out here:

• State average for Math proficiency is 80%.  Johnston is 92%.  In 2014, Johnston's 7th graders had a 97% proficiency in Math.  97%.  That's insane considering they have the 5th highest enrollment of 7th graders in the Des Moines Metro and the 14th highest 7th grade enrollment in the whole State.
• What's equally impressive is the consistency of both Waukee and Johnston throughout both the grades and the years when you consider the growth these 2 districts have been facing.
  • Waukee's average for all grades, all years is 90% (min 83% max 93%).
  • Johnston's average is 92% (min 88% max 97%)

• Reading is a little more volatile and Urbandale and West Des Moines (to a lesser extent) are all over the place. 

So the last area I wanted to look at was Teachers.  I'll include my visuals here that I did for my discovery, but I think I've determined which elements I want to bring into the Tableau Dataset.

Here's the Average Teacher Age for the 4 Districts:

The other areas I want to explore further for Teachers, but didn't visualize that well for these 4 are:

• Teachers Average Years of Experience
• Average Salary
• Percentage with Advanced Degrees
• Total Full Time Teachers divided by Enrollment

So I think we're in a good place to create a dataset in Tableau as I've identified elements I'm going to include from each area.

Hey Chris, here's the PoC Sales Funnel Dashboard.  It is not a responsive design, I've got the width set for iPad, but it'll probably work best on laptop/desktop, but if you have an iPad/Tablet, it is touch enabled so it'll work, but typically design for touch and click can/are different experiences... anyhoo I'll stop before I go off on a rant.  Take a look, lemme know if you have questions, want to see what else Tableau can do, capabilities, etc.

Here's a look at every college football game from 1960-2010 courtesy of James Howell's database.  All visuals are Interactive.

The bottom visual has every team and their W/L by points.  Above the line = win, below = loss and by how much.  

This Dashboard looks at the Census Population by Age and Gender for every county in the USA.  Select a State, then an Age or Gender group.  The County visual shows index of selected Age/Gender likelihood.  Courtesy of Census.gov.