How do you use data storytelling to engage and persuade your audience?
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Before you start crafting your data story, you need to understand who your audience is, what they care about, and what they expect from you. Knowing your audience will help you tailor your message, tone, and style to suit their needs and preferences. You can use tools like surveys, interviews, or personas to gather information about your audience's background, goals, challenges, and interests. You can also use data to segment your audience into different groups based on their characteristics, behavior, or feedback.
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Understanding your audience is critical to crafting a compelling data story. You need to understand your presentation's objective and what your audience must know, feel, and do to reach that objective. Use these three steps to prepare for success with your audience. 1. Collect Information: Review the attendees and highlight decision-makers. 2. Segmentation: Divide your audience into groups to tailor your message. 3. Analyze Feedback: Pay attention to your audience. This feedback provides valuable insights for refining your data story. Knowing your audience enables you to deliver a data story that captivates, informs, and inspires action to reach your goals.
Once you have a clear picture of your audience, you need to define the goal of your data story. What do you want to achieve with your data? What action do you want your audience to take? How will you measure your success? Your goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Your goal will guide your data selection, analysis, and presentation, as well as your narrative structure and call to action.
The next step is to choose the data that supports your goal and resonates with your audience. You need to select the most relevant, accurate, and reliable data sources that answer your key questions and address your audience's pain points. You also need to clean, transform, and validate your data to ensure its quality and consistency. You can use data management tools like spreadsheets, databases, or data integration platforms to perform these tasks.
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One major pitfall I've noticed is teams getting excited to dive into data without even having a clear idea of what they hope to discover. In simpler terms, they start playing with data that will eventually be turned into visual insights without having a basic plan in place. No hypothesis, no study design, no EDA, etc... hoping to find gold in the cloud. But let's not forget, this process of choosing data isn't just random; it's about methodically assessing the quality, accuracy, purpose, and reliability of the data. Analytics experts are well aware of the potential biases, errors, and oddball points that could twist the story, which is why taking a step back to think critically before picking the data is so crucial.
After you have prepared your data, you need to visualize it in a way that makes it easy to understand and interpret. You need to choose the right type of chart, graph, or map that showcases your data effectively and highlights the key insights, trends, or patterns. You also need to design your data visualization with aesthetics, clarity, and simplicity in mind. You can use data visualization tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Google Data Studio to create and customize your data visuals.
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Divakar Vijayan(已编辑)
We should also consider highlighting the aspect you want your audience to see, or at least make it easy for them to spot it. In my opinion, while choosing a representation clarity and simplicity (as mentioned) are important from the audience's perspective. We should not make it difficult to digest/calculate/understand the details to reach the presenter's conclusion. In essence remove all thorns from the path of audience's understanding and highlight it with rose petals so they can easily walk the path of thought we have laid out for them !
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Esri tools for data management can ingrate with data visualization software such as PowerBI or you can use native tools that come with Esri’s robust software platform.
The final step is to craft your narrative that connects your data, goal, and audience. You need to use storytelling techniques like hook, context, conflict, resolution, and conclusion to create a compelling and coherent story arc that engages and persuades your audience. You also need to use language, tone, and style that match your audience's level of understanding, interest, and emotion. You can use tools like PowerPoint, Prezi, or Storytelling with Data to structure and deliver your data story.
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Socialize your story. You spent a lot of time preparing the content. The content can likely be repurposed beyond a single meeting. Reuse it. Repeatedly.
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Use storytelling frameworks to craft your narrative. These are the most common frameworks used by expert consultants. 3 Acts: Setting, Conflict, Resolution - this is a classic framework introduced by Aristotle and remains an essential storytelling tool. SCQA: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer - This is a twist on the three acts and is used by many large consulting firms to address their client's problems. Pyramid Principle: Begin with your conclusion, then describe your main points that summarize the conclusion, and lastly, provide the evidence to support your main points. The hero's journey: An ancient story archetype that makes up many stories from Star Wars to Harry Potter. Happy writing!
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