Bhumi

We supported Bhumi’s mission to educate 150,000+ children and mobilise 200,000+ volunteers for social good.

Project: Visualizing the Volunteer Story: Empowering Bhumi with Data Storytelling

1. Executive Summary

Bhumi, one of India's largest youth volunteer non-profit organizations, engages a massive volunteer force to drive social change. While the organization's impact was significant, they faced a critical internal challenge: effectively communicating the scale and nature of their "volunteering story" through data. Bhumi partnered with DataChange Makers to bridge this gap.

A dedicated team of 16 volunteers contributed approximately 400 hours to analyze Bhumi's data and develop multiple data visualization solutions. The project delivered a suite of dashboards that not only provided new insights but also equipped the Bhumi team with a new understanding of how to report their work and showcase their impact.

2. The Challenge: "Difficult to Tell Our Volunteering Story"

Bhumi's operations are vast and complex, powered by thousands of volunteers across numerous projects. This activity generates a massive amount of data on volunteer engagement, hours, projects, and beneficiary impact.

However, the team struggled to synthesize this data into a clear and compelling narrative. As Anusha from Bhumi explained, "We’ve always found it difficult to tell our volunteering story."

The organization needed a way to move beyond raw numbers and spreadsheets to:

Visually represent the full scope of their volunteer activities.
Understand and report on their work more effectively.
Clearly demonstrate their impact to partners, donors, and future volunteers.

3. The Solution: A Collaborative Data Visualization Project

DataChange Makers assembled a global team of 16 skilled data volunteers to tackle Bhumi's challenge. This team, which included Santhosh J, Shreya Arya, Elena Lebedeva, and Sujan Maharjan, dedicated a combined ~400 hours of volunteering to the project.

Instead of a single, prescribed solution, the project was an exploratory and collaborative process. The volunteers were given access to Bhumi's data and tasked with finding the best ways to tell its story.

The team analyzed Bhumi's work and produced multiple submissions, including a variety of dashboards and reports, each offering a different perspective on the data.

4. The Impact and Outcome: A New Way of Seeing

The project was a profound success, providing Bhumi with both immediate practical tools and long-term strategic capabilities. The variety of submissions was a key strength, giving the Bhumi team a new lens through which to see their own data.

The impact was best summarized by Bhumi's Anusha:

"This process has helped me so much. I found something of value in every submission… I learned how we should show our data or report our work from almost every dashboard."

Rather than just delivering a single report, the Data ChangeMakers volunteers equipped the Bhumi team with a portfolio of visualization strategies. The project's true outcome was an organizational shift, empowering Bhumi with the knowledge and tools to finally and effectively "tell their volunteering story" to the world, backed by clear and powerful data.