On February 6, we launched the first Data for a Cause competition, which challenged our data community to visualize food insecurity problems.

We were able to provide over 20 years of data for the competition, including data from FAO, WHO, UNDP, and UNESCO, for 227 countries. This was challenging data to visualize — almost all of the measured data was averaged, and had a large number of null values.

Seventy plus people downloaded the data and played with the dataset. That’s about 50 more than I expected! That’s awesome.

Check out the 6 data visualizations that wowed Twitter. You can find them on the data visualizations page.

I’m really grateful to the data crunchers who stepped up to the challenge and authored our very first data visualizations!

Rob Harrand developed an impressive data visualization that shows mean access to improved water sources per country.

Data visualization by Rob Harrand

Daniel Tschick Tomaz developed a viz that enables everyone to easily grasp the prevalence of anemia among pregnant women, and domestic food prices, with a scatter plot.

Data visualization by Daniel Tschick Tomaz

Ehow Chen presented a heatmap visualization that shows the relationship between food prices and the percentage of underweight children.

Data visualization by Ehow Chen

Faye Xu focused on underweight children under 5 years of age by gender.

Data visualization by Faye Xu

Lamar Johnson developed a data visualization that showed the correlation between social factors and children’s health.

Data visualization by Lamar Johnson

Angie Chen examined micronutrient deficiencies in her colourful data visualization.

Data visualization by Angie Chen

This was a test challenge. Here are 5 lessons:

A link to a downloadable data visualization is not required, but is recommended. You don’t have to have a website to share your work. Simply put everything needed in a zipped folder, upload it to Google Drive/Dropbox/other, and share a download link. This will allow nonprofits and other contestants to interact with your visualization, and ask questions. In your submission Tweet include a picture/screenshot of your data visualization (jpeg, png, gif). The link preview that Twitter generates is only visible on Twitter. Make sure to include the hashtag #dataforacause in your Tweet! This is how we find your data visualization on Twitter. Give your data visualization a descriptive name and feel free to add other hashtags. For example, you can use hashtags to describe what your visualization is about, and what tools you used to create it. Deadline timezone. We are going to stick to US Pacific time (PST) for submission deadlines.

Thank you, once again, to our terrific data volunteers! None of this would be possible without your help!

And if you haven’t yet joined the Data for a Cause challenge, it is not too late to do so! In fact, today we are launching the next competition! Signup to get the dataset and challenge yourself to create data visualizations for a good cause!