Data Storytelling Leads to More Relevant, Usable Reports

Data storytelling is a novel way of communicating evaluation findings and recommendations in an engaging manner without overwhelming one’s audience. This approach allows evaluators to craft visualizations-appearing in dashboards, reports, and presentations-that are logically sound, compelling, and tailored to a project’s stakeholders. I recently completed Ann Emery’s “Report Redesign” course and have begun incorporating her research-backed approaches into my evaluation products.  Although Ann details numerous innovative design strategies throughout this course, her data storytelling approach for evaluation and research settings is the primary focus of this post. This summary may interest any consumer of evaluation data, including ATE evaluators, PIs, and their industry and academic partners.

Adherence to several key elements is necessary for the execution of this approach.

• Data storytelling relies, in part, on creating visualizations that leverage pre-attentive attributes (i.e., form, movement, and spatial positioning) for the processing of information at the subconscious level. This lets the author reveal a message-which might otherwise remain hidden in a dataset-more effectively and efficiently.
• The intentional use of color and bold font for keywords draws the reader’s attention to the finding under consideration (foreground), while the additional data in the graph (background) is grayed. Chunking data in this manner using dark–light contrast in visualizations ensures it is more digestible for technical and nontechnical audiences alike.
• Another central component of the data storytelling approach is to use a takeaway finding from a graph as the title of the figure. For example, the title of a population pyramid showing the ages of participants in two cohorts would be upgraded from “Figure 3. Age Distribution of Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 Participants” to “Cohort 2 Students Averaged 4.7 Years Older Than Their Cohort 1 Peers.”

The data storytelling approach helps frame what is most noteworthy. Each graph becomes a skimmable, standalone visualization of a key finding by prioritizing the reader’s focus on one data point at a time. In “Report Redesign,” Ann wisely reminds us that what we choose to highlight might not always be a project’s success story. Drawing attention to a negative or static outcome can be equally valuable for data consumers. Data storytelling is designed to help stakeholders make timely, informed decisions about resources, effective practices, replication, etc.

Since completing “Report Redesign,” I’ve become more mindful about weaving together the three pillars of data storytelling-data, visuals, and narrative-to give prominence to data insights. I can better convey meaning and context by transforming data into a persuasive narrative. In turn, project leaders are supported in making informed decisions and taking action related to programming and mid-course correction. I anticipate that my embrace of data storytelling will enable stakeholders to connect with project-related findings in a way that increases understanding, relevance, and impact.