Advocating with mobile apps

Apps are highly popular with users of mobile phones and tablets, especially when they are free, entertaining and informative. Many companies and non-profit institutions attempt to tap into this. Few capture the popular imagination by developing something that is both fun and meaningful.

Environmental advocacy group WWF has struck on a clever formula of charging a small sum for a game that has clear entertainment value, while informing users and raising funds for the cause that it is talking about.

As a measure of success, 500,000 people have already downloaded Rhino Raid. The game puts players in the shoes of an angry black rhinoceros in southern Africa, chasing poachers and avoiding traps. Proceeds from the $1.99 game support WWF rhino projects and the game also educates players about illegal poaching and the myths surrounding the use of rhino horn.

The app is available on Apple and Android.

WEB-BASED
Taking a very different approach to a very different issue, UN Women, UNICEF and UN-Habitat have launched a website that also works as a smartphone app. This is designed to provide information on support services for women and girls who are survivors of violence in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

The needs, benefits and inspiration behind the service are described on the UN Women website.

Creating a website in a mobile-friendly format helps to make the information as widely available as possible with minimal complications. The women and girls using the site are highly likely to be stressed and impatient. They could be using one of hundreds of different models of phones or accessing the site from a computer or other device. There is no need to visit an app store to download anything, which makes it faster and less of a burden on users who might have limited data allowances or minimal storage space available on their device. It also helps the developers by overcoming the guessing game of which mobile devices or operating systems to cater to: Apple, Android, Blackberry, Windows or even Firefox.

These recent examples provide a good indication of the diverse options for making information available on mobile devices.

Best Free Tools To Make Infographics

Here is a great selection of tools for presenting data in visually compelling ways. 


As Fast Company notes, "it's not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals."

A set recommended by Fast Company:

Many Eyes, by IBM;

Google Public Data Explorer;

Hohli for venn diagrams and scatter plots etc.;

Wordle, for word clouds; and

Visual.ly for not only creating, but also sharing infographics.

Link to post: The 5 Best Free Tools For Making Slick Infographics | Fast Company


Another great set of tools can be found here.

"Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools is a collection of tools that we... work with on a daily basis and recommend warmly... (and) will make your life easier, creating meaningful and beautiful data visualizations."

This list includes Web apps such as Stanford University's DataWrangler, for data cleaning and transformation, GeoCommons, a public community and set of tools to access, visualize and analyze data with maps, and Impure/Quadrigram, a visual programming language to gather, process and visualize information.

Read more about this collection at The Next Web. 


See also:

• 10 ways to report data better
• Infographic insights
• Infographics need stories
• Big data for development 

10 ways to report data better

Turning numbers and trends into stories and knowledge can be challenging to journalists and scientists alike, but also fascinating for their audiences. A blog by Troy Thibodeaux, Associated Press journalist and blogger on the  Poynter University journalism website, provides a detailed and helpful list of tools to probe and present data.

The tools are divided into the following categories:
1. Spreadsheets, for basic presentation and analysis
2. SQL, for relational databases and more
3. Data cleaning tools, for removing impurities
4. Visualization tools, for the big picture
5. Mapping software, to see where you are
6. Scripting language, to help present this information
7. Web framework, for getting it online
8. Editing tools, to write code, and more
9. Revision control, to spot mistakes and save backups
10. Document analysis tools, to handle large document sets as data, provide an interface and overcome formats like PDFs.

See also:

• The 5 best free tools for making slick infographics
• Infographic insights
• Infographics need stories
• Big data for development