Visualizing Impact: How Data ChangeMakers Helped Bhumi Tell Its Story

At Data ChangeMakers (DCM), we believe that data is a powerful catalyst for social change. Our recent partnership with Bhumi, one of India’s largest independent volunteer-driven nonprofits, powerfully validated this mission. We are especially proud that this project, concluding in August 2025, marked our very first Data ChangeMakers project since our organizational start. 

The Scope: Turning Volunteerism into Actionable Insight

Bhumi, founded in 2006, works diligently in two core areas: providing quality education to underprivileged children and promoting civic volunteering to tackle complex social challenges. They mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers for social good, striving towards the goal that "Every Indian volunteering is our goal".

The DCM community stepped up to tackle several key objectives for this visualization project:

• To showcase the impact created by volunteers in a way that is both inspiring and meaningful for them, as well as impactful for donors.

• To generate crucial insights into what activities engage volunteers best and what contributions they find most rewarding.

• To explore volunteering trends by time, location, and engagement type, thereby converting data into actionable insights for Bhumi.

Bhumi acknowledged that while numbers can be reported (like events, volunteers, or tons of garbage cleared), a spreadsheet often fails to truly inspire. The organization needed "stunning visualization[s]" because raising funds for volunteer-run programs can be extremely difficult. The core purpose was to show the impact volunteers are making and help make volunteering "look cool".

Success from the Volunteer Perspective

The Data ChangeMakers community delivered, confirming the success of our inaugural project. We received 16 submissions total, demonstrating a great breadth and depth of analysis.

The dedication of our volunteers was outstanding, with the community spending approximately 400 hours of volunteer services on the project. We saw participation from data enthusiasts across the globe, including individuals from India, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, France, and Nepal. The project fostered robust collaboration, which was "amazing" on Slack, with people helping each other and sharing wisdom. The submissions utilized a wide array of tools, including Tableau, Power BI, and Looker Studio.

Bhumi selected four visualizations for their core use cases. We are incredibly proud to recognize the global team whose efforts cemented the success of our first project:

Strategic Volunteer Data Explorer

Santhosh J from India developed an organized Power BI report that was praised for exploring many axes of comparison, offering filters for time, location, duration, and activity type. Santhosh noted that this approach was achieved by creating custom columns and categories for participation range, volunteering hours, and duration to easily interpret the data. This visualization was designed to be useful for both event implementers on the ground and senior leadership strategizing.

Santhosh’s comprehensive Power BI dashboard showing key metrics, event categories, volunteer distribution, and events by type and participant range

The Blossoming Impact Timeline

Shreya Arya from the United Kingdom created an "absolutely stunning" visualization using Tableau. She designed a radial timeline of flowers where each flower represented an event sized by the scale of the outcome. This unique approach was suggested by Bhumi for inspiring volunteers and donors, and for potentially showcasing the organization's growth over its 18-year history. Shreya shared the sentiment that "Data ChangeMakers truly acts as a bridge between data enthusiasts and social impact organizations".

Shreya’s radial timeline visualization featuring colorful flowers swirling around the center point representing events and outcomes over time

Corporate Engagement Snapshot

Elena Lebedeva from Spain presented a focused visualization using Looker Studio. Her minimalist design centered on Corporate Volunteering data. Bhumi highlighted her charts on monthly volunteer engagement and events by type of implementation as favorites. Critically, the visualization offered crucial insights into how Bhumi could potentially standardize their data collection process for civic volunteering. Elena also noted that Looker Studio helped her explore her ideas quickly.

Elena’s corporate volunteering insights dashboard featuring key figures, graphs for monthly engagement, and event popularity by type.

Clean, Donor-Ready Impact Summary

Sujan Maharjan, from Nepal designed a report in Power BI using a clean, simple, and direct one-page format. This structure was deemed a "very compelling report to take to somebody like a donor" for quickly presenting the overall picture of Bhumi’s work. Sujan mentioned his excitement that this was his "first time making a dashboard for someone and actually presenting a dashboard to stakeholders".

Sujan’s corporate volunteering dashboard displaying a monthly line chart of events, KPI cards for participation and results, and tables showing volunteer hours and top implementers

Volunteers found the experience rewarding and deeply meaningful:

• One participant noted that "Data ChangeMakers truly acts as a bridge between data enthusiasts and social impact organizations".

• Another shared the personal connection, stating, "In my current role I don't really get many opportunities to volunteer and make a difference, so it's nice we have a space where we can help out others in the community".

Success from the Bhumi Perspective

Anusha Vishwanath from Bhumi was thrilled with the submissions acknowledging that the visualization process opened up many "new avenues of thought" for their internal teams. A Bhumi colleague reviewing the submissions was "blown away" and said they "never thought we could showcase our work like this".

The project offered significant internal benefits:

• Inspiring Storytelling: Bhumi learned about how to better tell their volunteering story, which they historically found difficult.

• Actionable Insights: The visualizations provided a means to understand the data through different lenses, helping Bhumi decide how to "scale successful formats and improve low-performing ones" for their civic volunteering program. The reports helped understand volunteering trends across axes like timeline, activity type, and volunteer numbers.

• Data Improvement: By seeing the volunteer outputs, Bhumi realized how they could improve and standardize their data collection process.

Potential Outcomes and The Road Ahead

The collaboration highlighted the power of data storytelling in amplifying Bhumi's mission. The work submitted by the DCM community is just the beginning; the next critical step is ensuring these powerful insights are operationalized.

Future plans and potential outcomes for the project include:

1. Building Live Dashboards: The immediate next step is to build live dashboards to operationalize the gathered insights. These dashboards will be designed to refresh automatically as new data is added to Bhumi's internal systems.

2. Strengthening Decision Making: These tools will empower Bhumi to strengthen decision-making, especially around scaling successful event formats and improving low-performing ones.

3. Boosting Volunteer Engagement: The volunteer teams will use the new visualizations to highlight achievements, boost morale, and increase ongoing volunteer engagement. Bhumi is even looking into gamification elements like leaderboards and badges for recognition based on participation and impact.

4. Enhancing Donor Confidence: The visualizations will be key materials for Bhumi's fundraising teams, showcasing the measurable impact of their volunteer programs and helping to raise necessary funds.

We are excited to continue this journey with Bhumi, ensuring the volunteers' hard work translates into sustainable, long-term impact.

Together, we turned data into impact.