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A non-profit has donors with monthly commitments, which you can think of as subscriptions. What is the best way to show for each month new acquisitions, cancels, and net growth? The relationship is

 net growth = new acquisitions - cancels

The same time of chart could be appropriate for net profit (business) or net income (personal finances).

The first (and more important) problem is the design: it must be attractive and easily understood by non-technical people. The design is really the answer to this question.

The second problem, which is not required in the answer, is the implementation: I prefer to implement this in SAS, Excel, SharePoint, or some JavaScript library--- or maybe R.

One story behind the chart is new acquisitions have a high cancel rate, so they both help and hurt net growth. (However, the cancels do not distinguish whether the commitment was new or old.)

My boss drew this example chart: Example chart

Here is a new design with an idea from xan's post. In this design, cancels are implicit, so I was able to simplify by eliminating one chart element. design 2

This chart from an EU report is similar: it shows imports, exports, and the trade balance.

EU chart

Here is what may be my final version: Net growth version 2

Glorfindel
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Andrew
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  • Also please don't simultaneously cross post at other forums, http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/net-growth-or-incomeprofit#post-2599 – Andy W May 08 '12 at 19:11
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    @Andy Why not? That's not an SE site. Cross-posting *across SE sites* is discouraged because we have a controlled mechanism for migration. We can't migrate to or from other sites. – whuber May 08 '12 at 19:20
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    @whuber, IMO whether it is on the Stack exchange sites is immaterial. The reason for discouraging cross posting is not because a question can be migrated, it is because it is a waste of people's time to answer questions that have already been answered. – Andy W May 08 '12 at 19:35
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    That's a suitable topic for a meta discussion, @Andy. A quick search on Meta indicates cross-posting policy *always* refers to SE sites only. Also, virtually every question here has already been asked and answered somewhere else, so the implication of your argument is that we're mostly wasting our time here... – whuber May 08 '12 at 19:41
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    A quick search on meta stack overflow suggests the same "netiquette" for cross-posting to other forums/list-serves applies in general as it does to sister stack sites (see [one example here](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/127016/150339), you can look through the cross-posting tag for other related discussion). To be explicit, one should absolutely link between both questions (and update each site if an answer occurs at the other site). Also preferably it should only be done when a suitable answer has not been obtained at one site after some time cont. – Andy W May 08 '12 at 20:01
  • ... or the question is suitably taylored to each site. Simply copying and pasting questions *simultaneously* at multiple sites is similar to spam (which is what the OP has done in this instance). I will bring up a meta post *on our sites meta* to discuss this when I get a chance. – Andy W May 08 '12 at 20:03
  • Sorry for the faux pas. Andy linked this article to the other site already, so I linked the article back to here. I'll try to cross post any useful conclusion. – Andrew May 09 '12 at 06:53
  • Thank you @Andrew, It is an interesting question, and I hope you get useful responses both here and on the Flowing Data forum. – Andy W May 09 '12 at 11:56
  • @Andrew, final looks nice, though I think the grid lines are more a distraction from the data than informative. – xan May 10 '12 at 01:16

1 Answers1

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Your mock-up looks pretty good, though I prefer not to mix scales on the same graph. You asked for gains, losses and net growth, but with your black line it looks like you're showing cumulative balance instead of net growth = gains - losses. You can infer net growth by comparing bars heights or translating the cumulative slope into the local scale, but it might be useful to have a direct representation.

Here's an derivative idea that adds a separate element for net gain or loss. The gain and loss are light colored while the net gain or loss is darker. And the cumulative balance gets a separate frame.

Net Growth

xan
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  • I like the use of shading to show the net. I've incorporated this into a new design which I will post. My boss actually drew the photo I posted and designed that chart, and I agree the black line looks wrong. He meant for the black to mean net, but he didn't position it correctly. I don't want to do cumulative because where would I start? We have a long history, and our cumulative values are _much_ higher than our monthly changes. – Andrew May 09 '12 at 06:56
  • Thanks for clarifying. RE: "cumulative values are much higher than our monthly changes" -- that's why they're on different scales. – xan May 09 '12 at 11:38
  • Ahh I didn't notice they were on different scales initially either! Perhaps further visually distinguishing between the panels would be useful, such as a space in between the top panel and the bottom panel (and enclosing each panel in a box). Very cool idea though (+1), I like the use of the super-imposed "net" categories, although I think the line as suggested by the initial OP could be useful as well. – Andy W May 09 '12 at 12:00
  • Good point about the separation @AndyW. The cumulative line is mainly there because I misunderstood the original mock-up, though I can see it might be useful to see a "net-net" -- the net effect of all the net changes -- the nets are varied. – xan May 09 '12 at 22:26
  • "your black line ... looks like you're showing cumulative balance" – Without reading anything on this page, it was immediately clear to me that the black line means gains minus losses. –  Jan 28 '19 at 22:04