On data literacy in PR

I’ve recently finished reading Tim Harford’s excellent book, ‘How to make the world add up.’ It is a book of – for want of a better phrase – popular statistics, explaining how to consume the data manifest in the world around us, in the media and social media, and make sense of it. It’s designed for a lay audience, no advanced statistical knowledge required.

From my review on Twitter:

There’s more on Amazon if you want a fuller assessment.

But the purpose of this post is less to recommend his book (though I do, and am), and more to consider the general attitudes to data in the world at large, and in comms specifically.

Tim’s starting point for the book is considering the publication of a different book, ‘How to Lie with Statistics,’ by Darrell Huff in 1954. In many ways, the publication of that book feels, to him, a seminal moment in our slip down the slope from quantified reality to the Fake-News-Verse we inhabit today. It explains how statistics can be used to manipulate ‘fact’ to achieve any outcome we like.

Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn had a rather fun way of putting one aspect of it, considering views around conscription in the 1980s:

Tim’s book isn’t groundbreaking – it picks up on the tricks of statistical demagoguery and provides simple, comprehensible guidance on how to avoid falling into the many traps on offer. On how to make the world, erm, add-up, to cite its title. And he does this really very well.

An attitude in comms

Whilst there are a growing number of comms practitioners who value the role of data and analytics in assessing impact, there are also those who hold that comms is fundamentally a creative discipline and that this somehow at odds with the idea of it being a numerate one. In fact, a friend once told me (paraphrased): “show me a comms person that likes a spreadsheet, and I’ll show you one I can’t bear to talk to.” Now, he may have been saying this in full knowledge that I love a good spreadsheet, and therefore successfully winding me up, but that sentiment has been known in and around our industry.

I would contest that idea in its entirety. First, comms is a function of marketing and is inherently commercial. If we can’t articulate the impact our work has with accurate data, we are missing the point.

Second, data and insight forms the foundation of strategy, without which creativity is meaningless. “Tactics without strategy is the quickest path to defeat,” said Sun Tzu about war and perhaps marketing too. The levers which move the world pivot on a bedrock of data and statistics. How can we influence things as macro as human or societal behaviour if we don’t understand the underlying facts underpinning human behaviour, as expressed through statistical models? Brand strategists and planners understand this intrinsically, and most good PR people do, even if they prefer to abdicate responsibility for actually engaging with the numbers to specialists.

Third, data provides one of many pathways to creativity. It unlocks insights, paints pictures with numbers and charts, creates new ways of looking at the world that require a foundational understanding of mathematics to see, to understand, to unpick. I love talking to data artists, to listen to and read the output of people like John Burn-Murdoch at the FT and Tim Harford on More or Less (as well as his book and Twitter!) see and tell stories through data that are so utterly fascinating... as well as to shine a light through the apocryphal data that takes up so much space and time in the media and beyond.

It’s this point that I think is so key. Data is increasingly core to our storytelling. We have a responsibility to be better with it as professional communicators.

The AstraZeneca challenge

Covid nerds like myself will have followed the process of AstraZeneca vaccine’s approval, and then the various kerfuffles it got into when its data was not all that it seemed. Natasha Loder, one of my favourite Covid-nerds and people to follow on Twitter as well as health policy editor at the Economist, commented on a recent Jab podcast that ‘it may have been a PR problem’ that the company hasn’t realised the various errors its made in packaging up and communicating the results of its trials, in terms of the efficacy and safety data.

These errors and the lack of trust they engendered seems compounded now through the difficulties medical regulators are having with trying to establish if there is a causal link between taking the AZ covid-19 vaccine and a rare type of blood clotting event (or not). This is a particularly challenging thing to do, and by the time you read this it’s a coin toss as to which way the judgement will roll. At time of writing, it feels very much like Schr?dinger’s causal link: it both is and isn’t responsible, depending on how you’re looking at it.

If you wanted reassurance, and you like a good story in data, though, this from Cambridge University’s Winton Centre is an excellent example of visual data storytelling:

If, on the other hand, you looked on the Prince William / sexiest bald man news story with admiration, then perhaps read this takedown of that particular approach to data-storytelling, or this much more detailed consideration of what types of data have worth, and the implications of this kind of work for the PR industry.

So…?

So, learn to read statistics. Learn Harford’s ten principles – they aren’t hard to grasp. Be credulous – challenge sources, methods, biases, sampling processes, the questions asked and those left unasked, and more. Challenge people who provide uncited statistics as evidence of one paradigm or another and – if you’re in comms – interrogate any statistic that goes in a press release, blog post or tweet. If you’re not working for a pharma company, it doesn’t always need to be a medical grade data point, but it needs to be robust and defensible.

Here’s to PR people who – if they don’t love spreadsheets – at least see the value they bring, for insight, for strategy, for impact, and, not least - for better storytelling.

For those keen on improving their data literacy, one of our clients, Qlik, is a founder of the Data Literacy Project, a global effort to help anyone and everyone improve their ability to understand, consume and interpret data. Lots of resources available on the website.