In August 2021, Stuff began publishing a weekly series of vaccination rollout charts as New Zealand’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign was extended from select groups to the general population.

Through a combination of charts, maps, and reporting, we broke down government vaccination data in detail to explain how successfully the rollout was reaching different age groups, ethnicities, and regions across the country.

We originally included the same data visualisations each week. This expanded and transformed to reflect emerging disparities in the rollout, along with changes in both the data itself and government priorities — for example, the introduction, and then scrapping, of vaccination targets.

The objective of the series was to transform the swathe of vaccination data the government released each week into something that was useful, engaging, and easily understood. We also wanted to share this information with our audience in a timely way, so we gradually automated almost all aspects of the data collection, analysis, and visualisation.

Going behind the numbers

While New Zealand’s government was keen to applaud the achievements of the rollout, we wanted to use our visualisations and accompanying reporting to get under the hood of the headline numbers and show, through nuanced analysis, where the gaps were.

Prior to the rollout, indigenous health experts warned that Māori and Polynesian people should be explicitly prioritised for vaccination; this never happened. Our visualisations were able to document the growing disparity in rates between these groups and the general population as the weeks progressed.

By combining vaccination rates with other datasets, such as socioeconomic deprivation levels, we were able to show these factors also had a bearing on the success of the rollout. This helped us deliver a level of detail that was otherwise not available through official channels or other media outlets.

The weekly vaccination update became enduringly popular with Stuff readers, regularly featuring in the site’s top stories.

Finding details in the data

We published the updates weekly for six months, with each update often attracting over 100,000 unique views. The series as a whole had at least 550,000 unique visitors (more than 10% of New Zealand’s population), suggesting that many people read more than one update. Each update also prompted positive reader feedback via e-mail and social media.

Finally, we wanted to give Stuff’s newsrooms and our audience autonomy over the data relevant to them. As part of the data collection process, we provided a tidied dataset to all editorial staff to examine for patterns and outliers in their own region. We also provided the most geographically detailed level of data (suburb/settlement level) to our audience in an easily searchable table that could be embedded in stories throughout Stuff’s Web site.

Our national and regional newsrooms have made good use of the data we provided, creating their own data visualisations relevant to specific audiences and finding story angles in the data to follow up on. Persistent low vaccination rates in one particular settlement (Murupara), which we monitored over the weeks, prompted a feature-length piece on the factors behind that community’s low uptake.

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