Browse the Valley Election Fundraising Data


Which Valley candidate has raised the most money? 

Who is donating to multiple campaigns across the Valley? 

Is there a way I can see a map of the locations where donations come in from? 

The Valley Indy wondered the same things, and so the staff is trying out Google Fusion Tables to analyze some of the 2013 municipal election data on a deeper level.

All the data can be found here, in this public Google Fusion Table. 

Browse the data to get a deeper understanding of who gets involved in local elections, and how the campaigns pay for their expenses. 

We offer this general guide to help you navigate the program. 

*Disclaimer: *Fusion Tables is a data crunching program. Some of the newer visualizations — such as the network chart pictured above — are in ​“lab” form, meaning Google is still developing and testing them out. Some of the ​“lab” visualizations may only work in some browsers, or may be temperamental in function. 


Browsing the Data

The Fusion Tables program allows you to browse through the data in several different ways. 

There are four tabs with different options for browsing. They are: 

  • as a row (like a regular Excel spreadsheet),
  • as a ​“card,”
  • in map form
  • in various chart visualizations.

Once you decide what form you want to view the data in, you can filter out excess information in order to see different relationships.

To do that, click on the blue Filter button and pick certain attributes.

In the photo at left, we are filtering out only Mayor Anthony Staffieri’s donations and the zip-codes where they come from. 

You can embed any of the displays by clicking on ​“Tools” and then ​“Publish” and grabbing the HTML code. This is how we embedded the list of donors in the Derby campaign finance story. 

Network Charts
The most interactive option using Google Fusion Tables is to look at the network connections between the information. 

The top photo in this story is an example of a network map. 

The size of the circles represents the total donations. So Staffieri, who has raised the most money in the Valley, has the largest circle in the network chart. 

Likewise, the bigger the donation from an individual donor, the bigger their circle will appear. 

In order to get the network chart to display accurately you need to pick the right options under the ​“Configure Network Graph” tab. 

Once you pick the attribute you want to compare (a good place to start is with donor and candidate), you must reset the number of nodes that appear on the chart. 

In the photo here, there are 341 possible data points, and all 341 are showing. 

If your network chart doesn’t look right, make sure you have the maximum number typed in the box, so all the information shows up on the chart. 

The information in this Google Fusion Table is being accumulated as the Valley Indy receives it, and will updated as the information becomes available. 

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