Communicating Your Results
Crafting your data narrative
Sharing your findings with the world is just like telling any good story — sometimes it’s more about the storyteller than the story itself.
All too often, truly meaningful and interesting data projects fall through the cracks because they lack a cohesive narrative or don’t convince the audience why they should care. Remember, it’s up to you to decide how to best leverage your data to tell your story in a way that is compelling, interesting, and true to you. Here are some guiding questions to get you started:
Who is your audience?
Your data story can and should change based on your intended audience. The contextualizing information you provide, anecdotes you share, or images you include in a professional journal would be completely different from those you’d choose to share to a group of high school science students. Consider the following questions:
What is your relationship to your audience?
Are you their peer? Did you used to be in their shoes? Do you have anything in common?
What can you do to understand your audience?
Create an audience profile for one of your readers/users
Have you interviewed them? Learned their likes/dislikes?
What is your ideal medium?
Your ideal medium is the format through which you implement your product or disseminate your findings, such as:
Digital (web, smart phone applications, social media, etc.)
Formal Print (reports, conferences, PowerPoint/Keynote presentations)
Informal Print (staff meetings, flyers, etc.)
Video
What do you want them to take away?
Is your purpose to share something generally exciting (informational) or do your results inform a specific decision or action (decisional)?
If informational: highlight the findings that are most shocking/interesting to you and your audience
If decisional: present the findings in a way that obviously supports some change or recommendation
This often requires you to contextualize your information — what else should your audience know to reach your conclusion?
General Tips
Hemingway will highlight lengthy or run-on sentences, remove overly dense writing, offer alternatives for weak adverbs and phrases as well as poor formatting choices.
Connect to your audience emotionally — how can you make this more personal?
Find the right balance between words/explanation and figures/tables/images
This will largely depend on who your intended audience is and what medium you are using — digital products should be more visual while reports or prints should rely more on words
Similarly, balance your quantitative data with qualitative data — too much dry facts or too many numbers may work against a compelling data story
Anecdotes, stories, and contextualizing comments also count
Start with your ultimate goal: What message do you want the audience to walk away with?
Designing Effective Visualizations
Finding the ‘best’ way to visualize your data takes time and experience — if you’re a beginner, focus your efforts on learning from others and refining your methods to master the art of translating data to diagrams.
|If you just need a quick chart or table, check out these online tools — they are simpler to use than the advanced data visualization guides and may be more appropriate for your specific project:
For more complex data projects, choosing the right visualization is more than just deciding between a pie chart vs. a bar graph — it’s about understanding your audience’s learning style and design preferences, leaning in to your creative side, and asking for lots of feedback.
Here are some resources to help you understand all types of data visualization, how to create them, and which choices are most appropriate for your data:
Beginner: This Step-by-Step Guide to Data Visualization and Design written for beginners
Sharing with Others
Getting your message out there requires you to actively share and distribute what you discovered or created.
Important Note: While it may seem as if we believe success is a necessary requirement to any “good” data project, this could not be further from the truth. No data scientists is free from failure, and data projects with less-than-ideal or confusing outcomes — besides being incredibly common — are immeasurably valuable to share with others. As a community, we will never learn from each other’s experiences if we do not communicate our failures.
Building the Data Community at CHHS
Across the agency, there are a few existing groups and initiatives that exist to help you leverage your department’s resources to publicize your findings. Take advantage of the resources available to you, ask for help from those who’ve done this before, and be proud of yourself for completing your project!
There are a number of “Data Showcase Teams” across the agency. They organize events to build a shared understanding of data, celebrate successes and failures, and learn from each other’s projects.
Your department or program may have an established visual and brand style that provides credibility to your data analysis, thus increasing its chances of publication. These styles standardize color themes, fonts, and citation formats across agency publications.
A repository of CHHS data assets is currently underway to streamline creation, maintenance, and sharing of each department’s resources.
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