Montana Healthcare Foundation

Montana Healthcare Foundation: Creating Engaging Reports

Through collaborative efforts with Montana Healthcare Foundation, I employed visual design strategies to transform dense healthcare data. The resulting narratives enabled impactful communication with diverse audiences.

Digital Reports, Print Reports, Social Media Visuals

The Situation

Moving the Needle on Healthcare by Reporting Data in Engaging Ways

Montana Healthcare Foundation (MHF) strives to improve the health and well-being of Montanans. A key focus of the foundation is improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, enhancing behavioral health services, and strengthening Montana's public health system.

A large part of their work is creating reports to build support for their mission. They collect data about healthcare in the state and share it with a wide audience. They need to make sure the content is understandable for sharing with the media, other nonprofits, policymakers and others who need to understand the issues quickly.

The Challenges

Sharing Complex Data with Multiple Audiences

MHF has a big mandate, and with it comes several challenges:

They have a broad audience and a lot of data and in-depth information to share.
MHF needed to figure out how to make that complex information simple and easy to understand.
They needed a collaborator who could understand the content, connect with multiple authors, and find solutions that engaged lay audiences
Statewide policies impact a large group of people all at the same time, and good reporting can affect this.
Legislative staffers and policymakers have a lot of priorities, but not a lot of time. Our case has to be made quickly, succinctly, and in a compelling way that grabs their attention.

Successful policy changes have wide-ranging implications and can positively affect large groups of people. What an opportunity to use visual communications to convey facts that can make a difference.

“We put a tremendous amount of time and resources into our health policy reports. Kate's design and data visualization expertise are invaluable as we prepare our data-dense reports for the public. She takes complex health data and creates visuals that are beautiful and easy to comprehend. She has also become a thought partner in distributing our reports, bringing innovative ideas to help us better reach our audiences. We frequently receive comments that our reports are visually engaging and that the one-pagers are an important tool when sharing information with busy health policy decision-makers.”

– Melinda Buchheit, Communications Director

The Approach

Bringing Accessibility to Data with Visual Design and Interactivity

In collaboration with MHF, I developed solutions that engage:

We dove in-depth into the detailed and dense healthcare reporting, but brought it all to life using visual design to engage the viewer with the content.
Created a variety of media to provide the information in easy to consume pieces they could use to communicate broadly throughout the year. These included infographics, fact sheets, social media content, and other “bite-sized” visual pieces
We regularly work together to tell the story of the organization’s impact through annual reports, both digital and print.