Hi, I’m Cara
A freelance data consultant with a background in academia.
I have over 15 years’ experience of building stories with data, ranging from designing experiments to analysing candidates’ scores in postgraduate medical examinations. I have earned a solid reputation for making complex things accessible and simple to understand.
There are two main strands to my consultancy work, which allow me to meet clients where their data needs are:
- crafting intuitive data visualisations and clear narratives to help readers engage well with patterns in data
- creating bespoke solutions which automate data processes, and equipping others to use them
No matter the scale of the project, I find real joy in seeing faces light up when something obscure becomes plain, when a process that took days is reduced to minutes, and when people feel confident in their understanding of their own data. Whether you’re after a polished dataviz, a clear data-driven story, an automated data pipeline or a detailed report that updates itself whenever you feed it new information, I’d love to help you make the most of your data.
Great, how does that work?
First, get in touch. The easiest way is email: cara.r.thompson@gmail.com.
We’ll discuss your context and your data needs and make a plan from there. I charge a standard hourly rate, and will provide you with an estimated completion time based on the details of the project. If you have a R user in your group, I can help them get to grips with the code as part of the project. Once a project is finished, the code is yours if you’d like to keep building on it!
Recent projects for charities, businesses and research groups have involved:
- Data visualisation - Finding creative ways to engage readers with a need or a research outcome highlighted in the data
- Data-driven story telling - Helping a local charity build a narrative around its fundraising need to help potential donors visualise how they could contribute
- Creating bespoke graph themes and colour schemes - Ensuring datavisualisations are aligned with the aesthetic of the client’s web page or other key resources
- Data wrangling - Turning a convoluted copy-paste workflow across multiple Excel spreadsheets into a script that reads in the data and tidies everything up at the press of a button, ready for analysis
- Data analysis - Replicating complex analyses using a range of statistical methods in R and automating the reporting of outcomes
- Bespoke packages - Wrapping any of the above up into an R package that clients can reuse across projects
- Education and coaching - Working with clients to help them understand the code and providing guidance on data management
- “Agile” development - Responding to further development needs as projects have grown in scope over time
And how did you end up doing this?
For a more standard take on career progression, check out my CV or my my LinkedIn profile.