Athletes in Action is making their ministry to professional athletes in Europe more robust. I was involved with Athletes in Action for several years during and after college. My friend Andrew Eppes, currently the leading the team in Europe, asked if I could create a tool to visualize where all of the athletes were located. I was excited to partner with him and his team. I love to build out business systems to help scale a company or team and Athletes in Action has been an extremely important and transformational part of my life. If a company has a small team in a satellite location they need efficient systems to manage growth, drive alignment and cast a vision.

To support Andrew and his team in Europe, I helped create a database framework to track players on different teams in different countries and also created a dashboard in Google Data Studio. Using Google Data Studio allowed us to utilize different charts and graphs to help them get more insight into their ministry.

The purpose of using data visualization was to help Athletes in Action:

1. Formalize a database design.

Getting data out of a system is only as useful as it can be if it is organized in a way that is understandable, scalable and easy to use. More data isn’t always better. We needed to design it in a way that was easy for the team and their counterparts in America to collaborate.

2. Drive alignment.

As the team is working across geographies and time zones they needed a flexible and real time data system. The staff need to see where the players are located and also which Athletes in Action staff members have connected with the different players. The live database and visualization allows for this collaboration.

3. Cast a vision.

Starting a new segment of a non-profit, company or business can be filled with many emotions - exuberant elation from feeling the impact and positivity of your work and also extreme loneliness and isolation, especially when you have a lean team and are placed in a different country. Using a business intelligence tool helps cast a vision by showing progress through visualizing the countries that their players are in, seeing the number of athletes in the database, etc. Visualizing data creates a picture of what might be overlooked as data points in a database.

Below is the visualization I created. As a side note, all the data is demo data and none of it is real contact information. It has been randomly generated. Here is a link to the dashboard.