Easy-To-Use Spotfire Shines a Light on Homeless Charity’s Metrics and Wins the Great British Viz-Off
Blog: The Tibco Blog
The easy-to-use simplicity of the self-service visualization tool, TIBCO Spotfire, has underpinned many a business transformation and is now set to work its magic for the UK homeless charity, Evolve Housing + Support.TIBCO Software joined other market-leading visual analytics vendors in the Visual Analytics Community’s first-ever Great British Viz-Off in London earlier this month. As the third-largest provider of homelessness support in England’s capital city, Evolve Housing + Support threw down the gauntlet for a vendor analytics solution to help it better qualify the value of services delivered and demonstrate the broader social return on the taxpayers’ or donors’ investment, something which to date, had been prohibited by lack of resources.
The Great British Viz-Off tasked the participants with developing a visual analytics solution to help Evolve derive greater value from its financial data. Developed on-site at the event, the Spotfire application was voted as the winning solution across a range of criteria covering concept, approach, value, impact, and uniqueness. Voting was conducted live by the charity and audience who made the call that Spotfire was the preferred solution to help the charity analyze data, and understand key business metrics that could then be used to raise funds with sponsors and donors.
Evolve Housing + Support provided financial data associated with its work—individuals they have supported over the past two years. TIBCO Spotfire’s team developed an analysis and model to help the charity identify the social return on investment generated by every £1 of funding received. This analysis covered core criteria such as: improved employment and housing opportunities, and reduced demand for hospitalization and mental health support.
While Qlik, Tableau, Microsoft, and Alteryx all did a great job showing visually compelling and engaging dashboards, Spotfire also transformed these visuals and statistics into clear graphics at the heart of the questions being asked. Spotfire’s winning solution at the annual Great British Viz-Off was a simple and accessible way for non-experts at Evolve Housing + Support to understand their information and spot anomalies in performance in real time. Spotfire’s analysis was also built in a way in which Evolve Housing + Support can easily update and make changes, automatically reflected at the click of a button.
What the Spotfire team built was exactly what was needed—easy to understand and easy to use for analytics novices, such as the charity we were there to help. But this whole event wasn’t just about having the most advanced dashboards; it was the strength of the team effort and the opportunity to raise awareness of TIBCO among the London data analytics community. The fact that we could do all this while supporting an incredible cause was very rewarding and fun.
Reflecting on what gave TIBCO the edge that night, Evolve’s interim director of business development, Alice Hainsworth, said, “The TIBCO Spotfire solution proved to be the best fit for us, providing the best and most insightful presentations of our data, and is a really flexible tool that we will be able to use for years to come. The TIBCO team did a fantastic job of solving our data challenge and we are very grateful for their donation of the software to us and the pro-bono support in setting it up.”
See Spotfire in action and be a part of the digital business transformation conversation by attending TIBCO NOW, May 16-19 in Las Vegas; register for this year’s conference by visiting now.tibco.com.
Roman Bartik is TIBCO Software’s Vice President of Worldwide Alliances and Channels. He can be reached at rbartik@tibco.com
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
