How to Make Sense of Data through Engaging Stories
Today, the collection of information in companies has become indispensable. One last element seems to have been forgotten: the restitution of information. How to share the data analysis results with engaging stories?
It is not always easy to interpret data and spreadsheets. However, employees are obliged to do so, regardless of the sector or size of the company. In order not to flood your speech with superfluous data, it must be managed using business intelligence and reporting tools.
The challenge of data analysis lies in their interpretation and communication, and the ways to make it accessible and understandable by all.
Data Visualization – Make Your Data Speak
Data visualization allows representing data that is difficult to manipulate, and help improve the understanding from its analysis. By eliminating the superfluous, the essential information is enhanced by adding logical connectors. It also serves two main issues for companies:
- Decision-making: decision-makers and operational staff can monitor their performance indicators by linking them to external data (geographic, economic and meteorological);
- Communication: succeed in transmitting complex information thanks to simple visuals that are easy to remember.
The primary goal is to tell a story through data, instead of restoring a complete succession of indicators and graphs. To communicate the message as thoroughly and fairly as possible, it is important to know how your target interprets the data you communicate to them.
Strengthen Your Data Analysis through Impacting Stories
When playing with data, it is not easy to develop an impacting message. Manipulating data can be frightening and yet this is what your audience will focus on during your presentation.
After a few weeks, no one remembers the figures presented. On the other hand, everyone remembers the essence and the impression felt at a meeting. Often, data storytelling is associated with presentations and pretty graphics. Yet we must look beyond this visual dimension. Data storytelling is the effective combination of data, visual and narrative.
Great speakers evoke their experiences and feelings to present a given fact or fact. Giving context to your speech will help you to attract the attention of your audience.
If you can spot and understand the origin of your audience’s concerns, or it’s even better, you can then adapt your comments to their experiences and they will feel more concerned. It will then be much easier to send them the messages you want to communicate to them.
5 Tips to Help You Create Impacting Stories
1. The origin of the data
If your analysis is taken from a world of data that your interlocutors know, they will be more receptive to the messages you communicate to them.
2. A quick reading
The easier the data to read, the faster their understanding will be. Decision-making will then be facilitated. In addition, readers are not always familiar with the format of the data presented to them. It is therefore important to make information accessible.
A chart should carry a single message. It is presented on a screen or slide. Instead of accumulating ten indicators on the same screen – at the risk of losing your audience – it is better to present several graphs on different slides.
3. The quality of the subject presented
It is necessary to know the attention of his audience by telling a story. The fact is there only to support your argument. Contextualizing and scripting the data using impacting visuals (colours, captions, tutorial comments) will help your audience to project and capture your message.
4. The level of information delivered
When preparing data analysis reports, it is important to ask yourself the right questions and put yourself in the place of your audience. Do this channel and these tools correspond to the messages I want to convey? Is this graphic intuitive enough to capture my message? Is this indicator adequate to understand the information?
5. A simple and progressive pedagogy
The fear of numbers and data among our interlocutors is often an obstacle to the proper understanding of a report. Your audience sometimes needs to feel accompanied. The solution is to use pedagogy and use storytelling to shine during your presentation, as they will facilitate the understanding of complex data.
