I love using pictures, charts, diagrams, and infographics to illustrate and explain complex or hard to visualize ideas, concepts, and relationships.

Using Charts and Infographics at Melbourne Water

Since we deal with pretty complex subjects at Melbourne Water it makes sense for us to use well designed charts and infographics to explain what we do and how we do it. So, over the last year or two, we’ve been working with various vendors to produce graphics and animations that help us communicate better. We’ve also been improving our own chart-making capabilities so we can explain things more effectively to our more interested (which usually means more nerdy) audiences.

Here are some of the things we’ve done.

Explaining Systems

To explain how a system like Melbourne’s Water supply network works, you can use a static and somewhat technical map like this:

Or you can use an animated map to really show people what’s going on (click through to see what I mean):

That animated map has proven to be very popular: over the last year it’s been viewed over 40,000 times with visitors spending an average of two and a half minutes going through it.

You can explain complex systems without animations, too – like we’ve done with our Eastern Treatment Plant’s sewage processing diagram. This diagram comes in two parts. First, there’s a high-level overview:

And, then, there’s a more detailed explanation of the steps we take to process sewage at this plant (including the tertiary treatment bit that’s currently being built):

Explaining Relationships

Another important use for graphics is in explaining relationships between things.

For example, the Melbourne Water website gets about about 10,000 visitors per day. However, this figure jumps to 25,000 when it rains and over 40,000 when there’s a big storm in Melbourne. This happens because people want to know what effect the rainfall is having on our water storage levels.

To explain this relationship, we first used a simple column chart to show the basic trend (though the figures in it are from about a year and a half ago):

We then drilled down into a more detailed example and plotted the amount of rainfall recorded in Melbourne in August 2010 and compared that to the number of website visits received over the same period. The relationship between the two is quite obvious when you look at this graph:

These diagrams were made to be printed, by the way, which is why the text size on the axes isn’t all that large.

Telling a Story

At times, though, all you want to do with a graph is tell a story.

For example, we used this simple graph to explain the how Melbourne’s dams staged a remarkable turnaround in 2010, jumping from 25.6% full in July 2009 to 53.7% full in December 2010:

And we used this graph to explain that Melbourne’s total system storage depends a great deal on how full Thomson Dam is (because Thomson is almost 60% of Melbourne’s total dam capacity):

More generally, we use this graphic to explain to Melburnians just how big Thomson really is:

Showing Cause and Effect (i.e. Explaining More Complex Relationships)

Recently, though, we’ve gone one step further and have used a couple of charts to explain what, at the face of it, seems to be a strange result: rainfall for spring 2011 was 28.5% above average but water flowing into the dams (i.e. streamflow) over the same period was 22.4% below average. This happened because of what we call the ‘sponge effect’ and we used this graphic to explain what happened:

Now this type of graph isn’t for everyone to read and understand but, that’s okay – we know that a lot of our website visitors are water nerds just like us and that they appreciate the extra effort we make in explaining these results to them.

Hopefully, this use of charts and infographics to explain complex things is something Melbourne Water continues to do in the future. I know I certainly will.

I joined Melbourne Water as their Websites Manager just under a year ago and, since then, I’ve done a lot of fun and exciting web-related work there.

We recently hit a few important milestones so I thought I’d take this opportunity to do a quick roundup of what I’ve been up to.

Web & New Media Strategy

All the exciting work I’m doing has its foundations in the Web & New Media Strategy that was kicked off in early 2009 and involved a few months of research, analysis, and decision-making. The actual “strategy” ended up being a three-phase plan for building and enhancing the organization’s online presence over the next 2-3 years.

The first phase (basically, quick wins) took less than six months to do and involved plugging the holes in our existing online presence. This included numerous web tweaks, getting a better understanding of what worked or didn’t work on our site (via Google Analytics), and, generally, making better use of the website (e.g. more cross promotion on high traffic areas). We also bought a Google Mini search engine to remove one of site’s biggest pain points which was a crappy search engine.

The second phase (6-12 months) is finishing up now. This addressed a whole bunch of other web tweaks (like content rewrites and information architecture adjustments) and launched projects in five major areas:

• A complete site overhaul (redoing the site’s content, design, and information architecture and getting a new web content management system)
• More multimedia (specifically illustrations, photos, and videos)
• More and better online maps (the more useful and usable the better)
• More information provision via mobile phones (through SMS, mobile applications, and mobile web sites)
• Getting into social media (for information provision and stakeholder engagement)

The third phase (1-3 years) involves more complex projects that can’t be started till we have everything else in place (like a new organizational GIS and a web content management system). Phase three work includes the automation of customer-facing business activities, which means things like building online forms and applications, providing custom information via SMS, and so on.

What’s Exciting Now?

Right now, though, we’re nearing the end of the second phase and we’ve made great progress in all five of the areas mentioned above:

• We’ve kicked off a project to get a new web content management system and have started the website redesign and reorganization process.
• We’ve started to place photos on Flickr (including ‘Photos from the Field’ which are from Melbourne Water employees) and videos on YouTube (almost all of which were produced in-house).
• We’ve got some really basic maps on our site but have kicked off a project that will move all our old and clunky maps to a better platform over the next year or so. Meanwhile, we’ve developed an interactive map that explains in simple terms how Melbourne’s complicated water supply network works.
• We’ve launched an iPhone app (link to iTunes store) and will be launching a new mobile version of our website in the next few weeks.
• We’re quite active on Twitter and will get further into social media when appropriate.

All in all, we’re tracking quite well and the work we’re doing is lots of fun and really quite exciting.

Culture of Innovation & Effective Communication

What I love most of all, though, is how much on-board everyone at Melbourne Water is with these enhancements. This support and appreciation of innovation and effective communication starts right at the top, too. For example, it was our Board who originally suggested that we develop a simplified water supply network map for the website. They wanted a simple way of explaining a complex system and realized that the web would be a great place to do just that.

In my opinion, the foundation for this is laid in Melbourne Water’s Strategic Framework document which explicitly lists the support of “innovation, achievement, and good ideas” and the need to “understand, manage, and meet or exceed customer expectations” as success indicators for the organization. At Melbourne Water these aren’t just phrases on a company brochure but actual, practical goals that all of us aspire to every day. In fact, to give you an example of how this is implemented practically: Every project that’s proposed at Melbourne Water has to explain and justify which of these strategic goals it’s addressing before it’s allowed to start.

So the work that I’m doing there both matches the direction the world is moving in (i.e. information provision and customer engagement is moving online) and is brilliantly supported by the organization itself. That’s yet another reason why I love working there.

I’ve been at Melbourne Water for over six months but haven’t yet blogged about what I actually do there. So, thanks to the end-of-year holiday season that has given me the time to get back into blogging, here goes.

What Do I Do There?

My job title is ‘Websites Manager’ and that role sits in the External Affairs team which itself is part of the broader Communications & Community Relations group.

My tasks include:

• Managing all of Melbourne Water’s websites (i.e. the main site and various sub-sites)
• Developing and implementing a Web & New Media Strategy for organization (this includes getting the organization involved with social media)
• Helping knowledge specialists from across the business create and maintain their web content
• Proactively seeking content to place on the web (this includes content that site visitors want to see and content that we want site visitors to see)
• Liaising between our web solution provider and the rest of the business (including, sometimes our own internal IT department)
• Managing the Website Advisor (who focuses primarily on the online needs of the Waterways group)

More generally, my job involves three things:

• Tactical management: Managing web content and being the go-to guy for everything related to the web (and, increasingly, multimedia and social media).
• Strategic management: Finding out what our current online presence is, determining what we want that online presence to be over the coming years, and figuring out how we’re going to get there. This includes doing things like a complete site overhaul and pursuing new online models of stakeholder engagement (specifically, social media).
• People management: Overseeing work done by the Website Advisor and managing the web team’s relationship with the rest of the organization.

That’s a lot to do but I’m having an awesome time doing it. If it didn’t keep me so busy, I almost wouldn’t call it “work”.

What’s it Like to Work There?

It’s awesome. I love the people, I love the culture, and I love the commitment everyone has to their work, to Melbourne, and to the planet in general. It’s really great to work alongside people who are experts in their fields (many of them are geeks like me) and who love the work that they do.

I really appreciate the fact that the organization truly cares about, and cares for, its employees. And I love that we don’t have to leave our lives (and the rest of the world) at the doorstep when we step into the office.

I love the range of work that the organization does – everything from:

• sourcing and storing water,
• treating and providing water (to Melbourne’s private water retailers), and
• taking care of our rivers, creeks, wetlands, and (soon) coastline,
• to collecting, treating, and safely disposing of our sewerage.

Finally, I am impressed by the importance and emphasis the organization places on good communication and stakeholder engagement. Indeed, excellent stakeholder engagement is a core strategic objective for Melbourne Water. I am particularly empowered by this focus because so much of that communication and engagement is moving into the online space (including social media) and that’s specifically what I am responsible for (and really enjoy doing).

So, You Like it, Then?

Yes, very much so!