Question: How do you know that you’re in “storytelling” mode as opposed to general “presentation of information” mode? ?
Answer: When these four simple elements are present, you know you’re in storytelling mode.
- Setting - Stories, both macro and micro, ground the audience in a setting of time and place. This could be the date range for the data being examined in a macro story to the date and location of a specific customer in a micro story.?
- Characters – Stories, both macro and micro, contain characters. In macro stories, the characters might be the population represented in the data or the population impacted by the measures in the data. In micro stories, the characters are specific individuals who represent the larger data population.?
- Object of Desire – Stories must have an element that drives passion and motive from which to draw inspiration, progress, and measurement. The characters in both macro and micro stories must want something. Whether it’s a company or organizational goal or the desires of the people they serve, the stories are driven by a desire for characters to have or achieve something.?
- Obstacles – Stories are compelling if the characters face some sort of challenge in their effort to obtain what they desire. Macro and micro stories can be used to focus a story on pain points that prohibit characters from obtaining their object of desire.?
Data-backed presentations without these elements are just presentations of data, not stories that move people to action. The next time you go to tell a data-backed story, ask yourself:?
- Have I grounded my data in a time and place??
- Are the characters represented by the data points (or who wants to influence those data points) vivid? ?
- Is it clear what those characters most desire? ??
- Is it clear from the data what is making it difficult for those characters to get what they want???
Share how you have (or how you are) practicing data-backed storytelling that moves people to action in your role and industry.?
Sally Perkins
serves as Sr. Manager of?Storytellers at Authenticx. She analyzes quantitative and qualitative conversational data from which she crafts impactful data-backed stories that offer insights into how professionals across industries, such as healthcare, can improve the customer experience and their business outcomes.?
#DataBackedStorytelling #DataStorytelling #Storyteller #StorytellingTips #StorytellingTechniques #DataAnalysis #VoiceOfTheCustomer #NothingReplacesListening #Authenticx?
Evangelizing the human experience ??| Helping business compete on purpose | Conscious Capitalist ??
9 个月One thing that I often hear from Customer Experience #CX professionals is the power of using verbatim comments in their presentations. I understand why this is powerful because it's unstructured data and contains the words and phrases that are expressed directly from customers. However, verbatim comments often do not contain all of the elements that Sally Perkins mentions in this tip. I've found that when we can use other data sources, such as contact center interactions, we are more effective at prompting action, and I suspect that's because this data source contains the necessary story elements. Great tip, Sally!