Presenting Data More Effectively

Presenting Data More Effectively

Reporting the findings of data-driven discovery is often thought of as “the crucial last step” in an analytics program. Unfortunately, this is often misinterpreted as meaning it is of lesser importance – nothing could be further from the truth!

No matter how many petabytes of data you’ve streamed in real-time and how sophisticated your analytics stack, if it doesn’t give the right people the right information at the right time, you’re wasting your time. And probably a whole lot of money and other resources, too.

SID Institute  consultant Keith explains how to Present Data Effectively: Communicating Your Findings for Maximum Impact. We are well-known experts on matters involving visualization and communications, and he spoke to me to pass on some basic, but often overlooked, tips on presenting data so it will make an impact.

“I think the big issue is we often forget how hard it is to be a consumer of data. It’s great that everything has become so data-driven but I think we have so much of it that we have what I have been calling ‘the burden of knowledge,’ Keith tells me.

“That means that we know so much, it’s hard to talk about it to people who don’t know – as you gain more expertise it becomes harder to put yourself in the head of your audience.”

So here are some of Keith’s tips for overcoming that burden and becoming more effective at communicating data-driven discoveries.

Carefully consider colour

“One of our strongest storytelling tools is to use grey plus some kind of action color”, Keith tells me. Anyone used to seeing corporate reports will be used to multicolour pie charts and graphs, often using whatever colors come up by default in a template.

This is missing an opportunity to take advantage of the storytelling potential of color – the primary component our sense of sight is based on.

Words matter

Great visualizations don’t leave a lot of room for words – the point is to tell the story using images. That doesn’t mean words aren’t important – the smart strategy is to think of it as meaning that every letter is essential, and there’s certainly no room for wasted words.

Don’t stay stuck in the past

If you’re reporting business analytics, at least 50 per cent of your audience will be reading them on a mobile device, Keith tells me. For some strange reason though, reports are often presented as if they’re intended to be printed out and bound into a book. This is totally unnecessary these days, Keith suggests, and leads to bad habits which could prevent your actual readers from engaging.

Start at the end

Alluded to above but this deserves its own heading – Keith advises flipping the script when it comes to the order we present data in. “We have to re-arrange our way of reporting.

Become a ‘numbers artist’

This involves thinking about more than logic and numbers when considering how to present your data. “Research shows that people are persuaded to take action or change their minds when you speak to both their heads, and their hearts,” Keith says.

Numbers do a great job of filling our rational need for quantifiable information. But when it comes to communicating how things will actually impact our real lives, or affect the world we live in, some form of humanizing or grounding the data in reality is often effective.

SID Institute consults in all data analysis and collection applications.

Kindly email us at [email protected] or visit us at www.sidinstitute.org for all your data needs.