Week 5 & 6- Narrative Visualization
Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice, Chapters 1 and 2 - Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
chapter one - understand the context
A little planning can go a long way and lead to more concise and effective communications. In our workshops, I find that we allocate an increasing amount of time and discussion on the very first lesson we cover, which focuses on context. People come in thinking they want data visualization best practices and are surprised by the amount of time we spend on—and that they want to spend on—topics related more generally to how we plan for our communications. By thinking about our audience, message, and components of content up front (and getting feedback at this early stage), we put ourselves in a better position for creating graphs, presentations or other data-backed materials that will meet our audience’s needs and our own.
The exercises in this chapter focus primarily on three important aspects of the planning process:
Considering our audience: identifying who they are, what they care about, and how we can better get to know them and design our communications with them in mind.
Crafting and refining our main message: the Big Idea was introduced briefly in SWD; here, we’ll undertake a number of guided and independent exercises to better understand and practice this important concept.
Planning content: storyboarding is another concept that was introduced in SWD—we’ll look at a number of additional examples and exercises related to what we include and how we organize it.
Let’s practice understanding the context!
First, we’ll review the main lessons from SWD Chapter 1.
Exercise 1.1: get to know your audience
Who is my audience? What do they care about? These may seem like obvious questions to ask ourselves when we step back and think about it, but too often we completely skip this step. Getting to know our audience and understanding their needs and what drives them is an important early part of the process for successfully communicating with data.
Let’s examine what this looks like in the wild and how we can get to know a new audience.
Imagine you work as a People Analyst (a data analyst within the Human Resources, or HR, function) at a medium-sized company. A new head of HR has just joined the organization (she is now your boss’s boss). You’ve been asked to pull together an overview with data to help the freshly hired head of HR get up to speed with the different parts of the business from a people standpoint. This will include things like interview and hiring metrics, a headcount review across different parts of the organization, and attrition data (how many are leaving and why they are leaving). Some of your colleagues in other groups within HR have already had meet-and-greets with the new leader and given their respective synopses. Your direct manager recently had lunch with the new head of HR.
How could you get to better know your audience (the new head of HR) in this circumstance? List three things you could do to understand your audience, what she cares about, and how to best address her needs. Be specific in terms of what questions you would seek to answer. Get out your pen and paper and physically write down your responses.
Solution 1.1: get to know your audience
Since this isn’t likely a case where we can ask our audience directly what she cares about, we’ll need to get a little creative. Here are three things I could do to set myself up for success when it comes to better understanding my audience and what matters to her most:
Set up time to get a debrief from colleagues who have already met with the new leader. Talk to those who have had conversations with the new head of HR. How did those discussions go? Do they have any insight on this new leader’s priorities or points of interest? Is there anything that didn’t go well from which you can learn and adapt?
Talk to my manager to get insight. My manager has lunched with the new leader: what insight did he get about potential first points of focus? I also need to understand what my manager sees as important to focus on in this initial meeting.
Use my understanding of the data and context plus some thoughtful design to structure the document. Given that I’ve been working in this space for a while, I have a big picture understanding of the different main topics that someone new to our organization will assumably be interested in and the data we can use to inform. If I’m strategic in how I structure the document, I can make it easy to navigate and meet a wide variety of potential needs. I can provide an overview with the high level takeaways up front. Then I can organize the rest of the document by topic so the new leader can quickly turn to and get more detail on the areas that most interest her.
Exercise 1.2: narrow your audience
There is tremendous value in having a specific audience in mind when we communicate. Yet, often, we find ourselves facing a wide or mixed audience. By trying to meet the needs of many, we don’t meet any specific need as directly or effectively as we could if we narrowed our focus and target audience. This doesn’t mean that we don’t still communicate to a mixed audience, but having a specific audience in mind first and foremost means we put ourselves in a better position to meet that core audience’s needs.
Let’s practice the process of narrowing for purposes of communicating. We’ll start by casting a wide net and then employ various strategies to focus from there. Work your way through the questions and write out how you would address them. Then read the following pages to better understand various strategies for narrowing our audience.
You work at a national clothing retailer. You’ve conducted a survey asking your customers and the customers of your competitors about various elements related to back-to-school shopping. You’ve analyzed the data. You’ve found there are some areas where your company is performing well, and also some other areas of opportunity. You’re nearing the point of communicating your findings.
QUESTION 1: There are a lot of different groups of people (at your company and potentially beyond) who could be interested in this data. Who might care how your stores performed in the recent back-to-school shopping season? Cast as wide of a net as possible. How many different audiences can you come up with who might be interested in the survey data you’ve analyzed? Make a list!
QUESTION 2: Let’s get more specific. You’ve analyzed the survey data and found that there are differences in service satisfaction reported by your customers across the various stores. Which potential audiences would care about this? Again, list them. Does this make your list of potential audiences longer or shorter than it was originally? Did you add any additional potential audiences in light of this new information?
QUESTION 3: Let’s take it a step further. You’ve found there are differences in satisfaction across stores. Your analysis reveals items related to sales associates as the main driver of dissatisfaction. You’ve looked into several potential courses of action to address this and determined that you’d like to recommend rolling out sales associate training as a way to improve and bring consistency to service levels across your stores. Now who might your audience be? Who cares about this data? List your primary audiences. If you had to narrow to a specific decision maker in this instance, who would that be?
Solution 1.2: narrow your audience
QUESTION 1: There are many different audiences who might care about the back-to-school shopping data. Here are some that I’ve come up with (likely not a comprehensive list):
Senior leadership
Buyers
Merchandisers
Marketing
Store managers
Sales associates
Customer service people
Competitors
Customers
Eventually, everyone in the world may care about this data! Which is great, but not so helpful when it comes to narrowing our audience for the purpose of communicating. There are a number of ways we can narrow our audience: by being clear on our findings, specific on the recommended action, and focused on the given point in time and decision maker. The answers to the remaining questions will illustrate how we can focus in these ways to have a specific audience in mind when we communicate.
QUESTION 2: If service levels are inconsistent across stores, the following audiences are likely to care most:
Senior leadership
Store managers
Sales associates
Customer service people
QUESTION 3: We want to roll out training—that sparks some questions for me. Who will create and deliver the training? How much will it cost? With this additional clarity, some new audiences have entered the mix:
Senior leadership
HR
Finance
Store managers
Sales associates
Customer service people
The preceding list may all eventually be audiences for this information. We’ve noted inconsistencies with service levels and need to conduct training. HR will have to weigh in on whether we can meet this need internally or if it will require us to bring in external partners to develop or deliver training. Finance controls the budget and we’ll have to figure out where to get the money to pay for this. Store managers will need to buy-in so they are willing to have their employees spend time attending the training. The sales associates and customer service people will have to be convinced that their behavior needs to change so that they will take the training seriously and provide consistent high quality service to customers.
But not all of these groups are immediate audiences. Some of the communications will take place downstream.
To narrow further, I can reflect on where we are at in time: today. Before we can do any of the above, we need approval that rolling out training is the right course of action. A decision needs to be made, so another way of narrowing my audience is to be clear on timing as well as who the decision maker (or set of decision makers) is within the broader audience. In this instance, I might assume the ultimate decision maker—the person who will either say, “yes, I’m willing to devote the resources; let’s do this,” or “no, not an issue; let’s continue to do things as we have been”—is a specific person on the leadership team: the head of retail sales.
In this example, we have employed a number of different ways to narrow our target audience for the purpose of the communication. We narrowed by:
Being specific about what we learned through the data,
Being clear on the action we are recommending,
Acknowledging what point we’re at in time (what needs to happen now), and
Identifying a specific decision maker.
Consider how you can use these same tactics to narrow your audience in your own work. Exercise 1.18 in practice at work will help you do just that. But before we get there, let’s continue to practice together and turn our attention to a useful resource: the Big Idea worksheet.
Exercise 1.3: complete the Big Idea worksheet
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