Seeing Our Work on the Map
We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we share and archive our work. Project reports, case studies, client lists — they all exemplify what we do, but they don’t always capture the full picture of The Spark Mill’s range of communities we partner with. That curiosity led us down a rabbit hole into Claude’s capabilities, moving from static images to building interactive maps that let us actually see our work in space. What started as a nice-to-have has became one of the more useful visual tools we’ve added to how we think about The Spark Mill's reach and growth.
The first map I built was for TSM itself: a full picture of our 2025 client locations across Virginia and beyond. I wanted to be able to look at a single screen and understand not just who we're working with, but where, at what density, and in what capacity. The process was iterative. Early versions were too flat; dots on a map without much meaning. So I started working through what the visual encoding should actually communicate: Are there a lot of clients in one place? What kind of work are we doing there? Is this a strategic planning engagement, a retreat, an organizational development project? We landed on a system where marker size reflects the number of clients at a location, color signals concentration, and a ring around each dot indicates the dominant project type. Richmond — our biggest cluster — pulses on the map, and clicking it surfaces every client, every category, every project type in a clean panel. It went from data to story.
Spreading data across a geographic canvas can make it immediately obvious where you have presence and where you don't; whole regions of the state where you may not have built relationships yet. And, that doesn’t mean it’s a criticism of an organization’s reach; it's a planning tool. It internally helps us think about where we concentrate work, where we might intentionally grow, which communities could benefit from the kind of work we do, and where a single strong partnership might open a door. It also externally allows future clients to see where we have experience or if we have worked with other organizations in their sectors and networks.
Coming off the success of a TSM map, we stretched the skill to build a second map for a client project — a Main Street Virginia initiative with VDHCD highlighting 14 participating organizations across the Commonwealth. Same logic, different lens: in this case, a map could help a client communicate the geographic reach of their program to stakeholders in a way a table of city names never could.
If you lead an organization and you've never visualized your work with a map, I'd encourage you to try it; even a rough version. The process of deciding what to show and how to encode it is itself a strategic exercise. You have to ask: what matters about where we are? Is it density? Sector? Type of service? Underserved areas? Those questions don't have obvious answers, and wrestling with them sharpens how you understand your own footprint. The maps we've been building are interactive and embeddable, which means they can live in a report, a board presentation, or a funder pitch; places where "we work across Virginia" becomes something a reader can actually feel. If you're curious about building something like this for your organization, reach out. This is exactly the kind of tool we love helping organizations create.
