You can download data on donations (as well as loans, spending and other information) to political parties on the Electoral Commission website.

If you just click 'search' and scroll to the bottom where individual donations are shown in a table, there should be an option to Export Results as a CSV.

This data is good to use to explore data visualisation because it allows us to use a range of different charts for different purposes.

In this repo you can find a CSV of data downloaded in June 2019. There is also an XLSX file which shows that data being analysed in different ways to generate data for different charts. For example:

• Pivot [table] total donations by party - the top 5 are then used for a pie chart (composition)
• Pivot totals by non-party - the top 10 are used for a bar chart (comparison)
• Extract month/year - we need to do this to show distribution on a histogram, or change over time in a line chart, because the data only includes specific dates
• Pivot totals by month - to create a histogram showing distribution of donations over a typical year
• Pivot stacked bar: we use a field for columns but filter to just 2 of those that can be used to show both comparison (between bars) and composition (within the bar)
• Pivot year and party: to create a line chart showing change over time

Open Refine is useful for converting data from XML or JSON format, combining data, and cleaning it.

This tutorial explains how to convert, combine and clean food hygiene data so that it can be mapped

Here's how to create point maps in Flourish.

This tutorial explains how to create a map of points in Datawrapper. However, its zoom level doesn't go very far so it's only suitable for national-level stories.

Here's how to make choropleth maps in Flourish

Flourish does have a timelapse map of points, too.

You can create a cartogram election map in Datawrapper - details here

If you want to show the relative size of something compared to an area there's this tool