Communicating complicated concepts in an accessible way is one of the most important things a project can do, and one of the hardest. It’s very easy to get seduced by a pretty graph and fail to realize that it doesn’t convey your information in a useful way.
Sometimes we are just too deep inside our topics to be as clear and succinct as we need to be with donors, stakeholders, host governments, or other people who need to understand out work. The Stanford Social Innovation Review refers to the problem in their blog.
This handbook – Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design is a great guide to presenting data in an effective way. The tactical tech website in general is a gold mine of useful advice. I also really like Security for Human Rights Defenders.