“Our evidence is bulletproof, but no one understands it.”
Show how the method leads to the result so your audience can understand the problem and assess the evidence.
The Interactive Data Viz Academy
Getting the right answer is half the battle. Convincing people to act on it is the other half.
Darkhorse Academy is a six-session series on that second half: how research gets understood, trusted, shared and used.
Session 01Own the AdoptionChange doesn’t happen by accident.
MEET YOUR PRESENTER
Dan Haight
Founder, Darkhorse Visualization
Dan combines an award-winning teaching background at the University of Alberta School of Business with experience across healthcare, energy, marketing, professional sports, and transportation.
In this series, he shares practical ways to turn complex data into clear understanding and better decisions.
Learn with DanWhy we built it
A finding changes the world once people adopt it.
Dan Haight spent more than a decade building a university research centre before leading Darkhorse. That experience taught him that research achieves its purpose when people use the findings.
Darkhorse Academy shares what we have learned helping research teams through every stage that follows publication. It gives your team a common language for planning communication, policy support and impact measurement before the first chart is drawn.
14%17 yrs
The research translation cycle · Session 01
- ResearchResearch can be difficult to reproduce or arrive too late to inform a relevant decision.Sessions 02 · 06
- Publish “That’s often where it stops.”Paywalls limit access, while summaries can dilute the findings.Session 06
- CommunicateFindings may fail to reach people in language that they understand and find relevant.Sessions 02 · 03 · 04
- Support policyPolicies can have unintended consequences that researchers need to understand.Sessions 01 · 03
- Measure impactTeams can overlook the baseline and measure activity without assessing changes in outcomes.Session 05
- Report impactFunders need to understand what changed and how the work contributed.Session 05
- Secure fundingFunding can run out after the initial build, leaving ongoing work unsupported.Session 01
- Funding pays for the next round of research.
Built for
- Principal investigators
- Research institutes
- NGO and advocacy leaders
- Foundation program teams
- Public agencies
The frameworks
Philosophies behind our data visualizations
Every session leaves you with a way of thinking you can apply to your own project.
Framework · Session 02
Data, audience, purpose. Two out of three feels close.
Effective visualization brings honest data, a specific audience and a clear purpose together. Session 02 provides a self-assessment for each element so your team can identify gaps before they weaken the work.
The sweet spotImpactData + Audience + Purpose
An effective visualization presents honest data in a form that helps a specific audience make a decision.
Ask firstWhat decision, and for whom?
Hover or tap any region. Dead-end names come from Dan Haight’s essay “Two Out of Three.”
Framework · Session 04
The Data Hero Framework
The Data Hero Framework combines stories that earn attention, interactions that help people explore findings relevant to them, and sharing tools that bring those findings to new audiences. Each person who shares creates an opportunity for someone else to discover the work.
In practice · Opportunity Atlas
The Opportunity Atlas uses all three stages: a story about economic mobility, a map people search for their own neighbourhood, and views they can save and share. Sessions 01, 04 and 05 follow it from launch to policy impact.
Three ways to curate the story · Session 04
Framework · Session 03
Clarify, persuade, scale.
Data visualization solves three communication problems, and most projects have one that matters most. Each sounds different when a client describes it, and each calls for a different kind of tool.
“Our data tells stories nobody wants to hear.”
Pair a story with a tool that lets people explore the evidence and understand how the findings relate to their own decisions.
“Every community needs to see their own story.”
Reach people with stories relevant to their communities and circumstances at a time when they can use the findings. Scaling accounts for about three-quarters of our work.
“You can never persuade someone if they don’t first understand it.” — Dan Haight, Session 03
Measure what changed · Session 05
Count outcomes, starting from a baseline.
Leading
Media & academicMentions, citations, coverage
ConversationSearch trends, social discussion
PolicyBills, briefs, government reports
Human thrivingLives measurably better
LaggingMMeasureAAnalyzeIInterveneMMeasure again
MAIM is Dan’s shorthand for impact work, beginning with the baseline measurement that teams often skip.
Design for trust · Session 06
Show the work behind every chart.
Program reach, 2018–2025
- DataSource, collection date and a download link
- MethodHow each figure was calculated
- UncertaintyRanges drawn right on the chart
- RationaleWhy this baseline, colour and timeline
AI can produce a convincing chart in minutes, which makes a visible record of open data, methods and reasoning essential for assessing its credibility. Illustrative chart.
Watch the series
Click Below to Start Watching
Each session runs about an hour, and you can watch the series in order or choose the session that addresses your current challenge.
Session 01 · Recorded July 30, 2025
Own the Adoption
You’ll learnHow to move research from publication to real-world impact
Dan traces the path from insight to human thriving and walks the research translation cycle stage by stage, including where each one breaks. A hockey-analytics story explains why the job ends at adoption, and the Opportunity Atlas shows the whole cycle at work.
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PUT IT TO WORK
Darkhorse Visualization builds interactive tools that carry research through every stage after publication. Tell us about the findings you want people to understand, trust and use.