Tableau Test Drive for Raiser's Edge Reporting - Worksheet Map

This is part IV in our series of looking at Tableau as our RE reporting solution.  You can see the other posts in the links below:
Part I - Installing Tableau
Part II - Connecting To RE and Planning our Dashboards
Part III - Our First Worksheet

In this installment we will now create a map showing where our constituents are located.  The first step is to create a new worksheet in Tableau.  After doing that we selected the map "chart" type to display our data.  We have selected State as our point of departure for  map information and again the count of records.  This map already begins to tell us a pretty compelling story in a very cool way:  most of our records are on the east coast with our biggest concentration in the southeast, specifically South Carolina.  But that is no surprise for our Raiser's Edge users who log into and play around with the sample database (the source of our data for this example).

Simple map of our Raiser's Edge records and relative number per state

Now that we have our map we can do some interesting things to "spice it up" as my wife likes to say.  So I brought over the primary constituent code dimension field into the Color section and the map becomes richer.  Now we can see colors associated with each state, telling us which constituent codes exist in the state on the map and their relative numbers.  Pretty cool.

Constituent Codes now showing up in each state

After taking a look at the map, I thought the size of the circles on each state was pretty small and difficult to read.  So I adjusted the size of the circles for the number of records for each state and the map now becomes a little easier to read.

Map after adjusting the size of the circles showing the number of records

Your map could be busy and you might want to add additional filters, such as for state, or other dimension fields.  My dataset is including all of the records in RE currently (constituents and non-constituents, aka individual relationships not linked to constituents).  So I am going to add a new filter to show the results for constituents only (Is Constituent = -1).

After adding the filter, the data is adjusted to show only constituents

There we have it, now we have a map of a breakdown of our constituents, based on constituent code and where they are located.  We could make this more specific and do some dynamic stuff like selecting a constituent code to show the results for a specific segment of our constituents, based on constituent code.