Data Storytelling

Mariam works for an e commerce company as a marketer. She gets relevant and role specific insights from the dashboard of the analytics platform her company uses. She is empowered to make decisions based on the insights she discovers, she has a track record of good decision making and is acknowledged for her great work. Up until this stage, she is doing…

“There are 4,000 people listening to you in this webinar.” “There are 300 people, who have registered for your speaking engagement today.” “There are 200 people dialling in from around the world to hear you speak.” These are some statements I am grateful to have heard over the last one month. Every time I heard these statements, I would first be filled…

On 14 July 2016, I wrote a blog Data tells you what’s happening. Stories tell you why it matters with the following featured image. Today, as I look back I can see how I was wrong to use an image that speaks about data being less than stories. In my storytelling work, I have always witnessed a war between stories and data,…

We want to introduce a change in our organisation, we put together a powerpoint with charts, graphs, reasons and benefits. When we finished our presentation everyone in the room has all the information and knowledge. They might even agree but would they change? Perhaps not. Carmine Gallo in his Forbes article elaborates this point,  Big numbers rarely spark action, but a sea…

Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of State – BBC Four video published in November 2010 is still one of my favourite examples of Data Storytelling. Many credit data visualisation and technology used for this amazing video but in my view the beating heart of this fantastic data storytelling video is Hans Rosling’s ability to storytell. I…

I am conducting a Data Storytelling Workshop for finance professionals who works at a MNC. Their slides are filled with information, so much information that it feels to me like a Slideument (Slide + Document). When asked, “Why do you have so much information on a slide that you are presenting?”, their response was, “It’s a template that I have to follow.”…

Sam and his team, having worked hard to find an insight from data that they have received from their ecommerce team, finally find a meaningful insight after weeks of slicing and dicing the data. Excited, they walk in to a presentation to share the insight. Their presentation is structured like this: – We are here to make the following suggestions for an…

Words have always been the most natural way to tell stories. However, the rising importance of data has created a new need for us, which is to tell a story with numbers. Something that doesn’t come naturally to us. We have always presented an analysis of numbers. Hence, we are great at analysing the data but not so great at being able…