Many program leads now preview figures on a laptop and forget the packet is photocopied for directors who annotate in pencil. A clustered bar that uses adjacent hues will collapse. Direct labels beat a color key. Patterns — dots, hatching, a solid fill — beat a rainbow.
We design outcome figures for a printed page first. Type stays large enough to read at arm’s length. Gridlines stay light. Zero lines stay visible so a small after-school program is not stretched to look like a national campaign. If a year has eight participants, the axis should not imply eighty.
Maps follow the same rule. A locator that marks three neighborhood sites does not need a heat overlay. A simple pin and a street name will do. If you lack address-level permission, do not publish a dot that could identify a shelter or a clinic waiting room.
When a desktop record-keeping utility is used on a staff computer, export still has to land in a figure that a copier can render. A glowing screen preview is not the deliverable. The deliverable is the page that survives the board secretary’s stapler.
Test every figure by printing one copy on the office machine before the packet goes out. If a volunteer has to ask which bar is last year, redraw it. The conversation you want is about the waitlist, the roof, or the Tuesday lunch count — not the legend.