It’s Wednesday which means we are halfway through Dashboard Week. Today’s task was to use Kickstarter data from Kaggle, clean it in Tableau Prep, and then visualize it in Tableau. If you don’t know what Kickstarter is, it’s very simply explained a crowd funding platform of projects. Check out this link or a more in-depth explanation of how it works.
Data Prep
As I didn’t know much about Kickstarter myself, I had a quick read about it to get some background before I downloaded the data. The data was very well structured and clean, so I barely had to do any work in Tableau Prep. The only thing I did was to join in country names as the dataset only had country codes for each of the projects. Please see the snippet of the Tableau Prep workflow below.
Visualisation
As I was not familiar with Kickstarter it took some time before I knew what I wanted to include in my dashboard. I started with creating a lot of worksheets to just get familiar with the data and see if there were any interesting insights. You can see a preliminary dashboard I created during the exploration below.
After some time and many worksheets later, I decided I wanted to dive deeper into successful. I created a bar chart, ranking the project categories from top to bottom on number of successful projects. I soon realized that it would be interesting to look at this combined with success rate, which is the percentage of successful projects. The project category Dance is surprisingly the category with highest success rate, but at the same time the category with the least projects, while Music is the category with most successful projects. I also created a chart showing the funding goal and pledged funding for each of the categories and the difference. Some of the categories, Technology, Games and Design have much higher received funding than the funding goals for the successful projects. To make the dashboard interactive I made it possible to choose what measure to display, e.g. success rate, number of projects etc. using parameters. Finally, I made an overview of each category over time. The final dashboard can be seen below and found on my Tableau Public Profile here.
