Tips For Effective Data Presentation

As humans, our brains are hardwired to understand and respond to stories. Our ancestors used storytelling to explain complex concepts about the world and our place in it.

By visualising ourselves in the context of a narrative, we learn important life lessons about morals, actions, and consequences.

Stories are just as powerful when they are used in a corporate setting. Pie charts, percentages, and statistics are a useful means to organise data, but storytelling is what brings it to life and gives it meaning.

When you take your audience on an emotional journey, they are much more likely to understand, respond to and remember what you’ve said — and that is the secret to a great presentation.

Data storytelling as a powerful business tool

The goal of any presentation is to educate, persuade and inspire your audience to take action. Providing evidence in the form of data is a crucial element of a good presentation, but slide after slide of facts and figures won’t inspire anyone.

To make the data resonate with your audience, you need to make them feel something. How? By weaving the data into a compelling narrative that taps into their emotions. Presenting data without telling a story is like delivering a punchline without the joke — it lacks context and is, therefore, less impactful.

We’ve all been there – sitting in a stuffy room with a group of people, watching someone flick through PowerPoint slides, pointing at charts and reiterating the words on the screen. You don’t feel any connection to what’s being said, so you zone in and out, no matter how hard you try not to. As humans, we can’t help it. And at the end of the presentation, you can barely remember a word of it.

Now imagine you’re in a presentation where the speaker opens with a scenario that you instantly recognise. The rest of the presentation follows a familiar story structure that you can relate to. They draw you in and keep you hooked all the way through, breathing life into the facts and figures on the screen and giving them a whole new meaning.

Telling a story with your data is the difference between a boring, forgettable presentation and one that inspires your audience and stays with them long after you’ve finished speaking.

How to start storytelling with data

Storytelling is a powerful way to communicate your ideas and get your audience to take action. But how do you take your data and weave it into a story? How do you decide what to include and what to leave out?

Even if you don’t consider yourself much of a storyteller, there are tried-and-tested techniques and templates that you can use to start telling better stories with your data.

First, identify your ‘big idea’ — the one thing you want your audience to learn from or do with the data you’ll be presenting. This should be based on your audience’s needs, first and foremost.

Then, develop a basic narrative structure that supports and drives your big idea forward.

Story Templates

Here are some of the templates that are most commonly used to help place the listener in the centre of the storyteller’s tale:

1. The David and Goliath Story Template

This template is based on the familiar story of the underdog (David) defeating the likely champion (the much bigger and stronger Goliath) and is often used by leaders to inspire and motivate their teams.

You can use this template in your presentations, too. The key is to help your audience see themselves as David in the story; capable of overcoming any challenge, no matter how big.

2. The Hero’s Journey

This follows a structure that will be familiar to most people. It starts with an unlikely hero embarking on an adventure filled with peril. He learns some important lessons along the way and defeats an evil adversary or overcomes an obstacle of some kind. He returns home a changed man, much wiser and happier as a result of his experience.

In the case of data presentation, the ‘hero’ of your story can be the report, statistics or the actionable insight you are aiming to impart (but it can never be you!).

The journey can be the struggle to get the data seen and understood, and the obstacle can be what is getting in the way of this data becoming reality.?

3. Situation – Obstacle – Action – Result

With this story template, you can start by setting the scene for your audience, showing them the way things were and helping them to identify with the main character in the story.

Then introduce the obstacle — the thing that was standing in the way of their success — and outline the steps the character took to overcome this obstacle. Finally, show how things changed for the better as a result of taking action.

There are many other storytelling templates that you can adapt to your own needs, so don’t be afraid to experiment.?

Data visualisation vs data storytelling

Data visualisation and data storytelling are two distinct but often conflated concepts, so it’s important to understand the difference.

Data Visualisation

Data visualisation is about presenting data in a visually appealing, easy-to-understand way. It helps the audience to memorise and understand the information being presented.

Data storytelling

After data is collected, processed and analysed, there is one final step: to communicate it clearly and effectively. This is what gives it meaning. Without meaning, data is merely a collection of words and numbers on a page or a screen.

Data storytelling is the next step up from data visualisation — it adds the ‘secret sauce’, which is the element of human communication. It is the bridge that makes your data accessible to your audience, helping to inspire, influence, and persuade them to take action.?

Lastly, working towards developing your Executive Presence will elevate your data presentations from those that educate and persuade to ones that truly resonate and inspire. To find out more, check out this recent article:?Cracking The EP Code.

If you’re ready to learn how to harness the power of storytelling with data for your next presentation, check out NxtGEN Executive Presence’s Corporate Storytelling programme?here.