In a world where data is at our fingertips, the quality of information an organization has about their internal operations, the competitive landscape, and their customers can be the differentiating factor in making them a competitive force in the industry— how they use this information can make them an industry leader.
Tools such as business intelligence, dashboards, and spreadsheets have helped lay the foundation for businesses to start to utilize their data but analytics and data can only tell you what is happening. It is up to organizations themselves to tell their story and why it matters.
Adopting a Data Storytelling Culture
The three elements of data storytelling include the insights from the data itself, visualizing these points in a digestible way, and tailoring the language and story for the intended audience. Understanding the audience sets the vision and the narrative that can ensure the insights drawn are connecting and can be used to make decisions.
Insights: Being able to look at a large array of data and make the connection of what to highlight is crucial in ensuring the audience gets a high-level view of the operations while maintaining a level of detail customizable for the intended user.
Visualizations: Utilizing dashboards to present information can make the data interactive and can focus the audience’s attention on the important components through the use of charts and graphs to contextualize the data insights at a glance.
Story: The narrative behind the data is the piece that links everything together — speaking the language of the audience can put the insights and visualizations into perspective and can lead to higher engagement with your target audience.
Who's Doing it Well?
One example of a company that was able to blend data, visualizations, and story is Uber. They use data storytelling to highlight the impact the company has on each user by showcasing personalized statistics and quantifying the user’s experience on the app.
Beyond that, they also use this data to tell a story about the company as a whole such as the campaign they released titled “10 facts you may not know about Uber drivers.” This campaign was made to tie the brand’s values to societal trends through the use of data storytelling. Uber Movements is another solution the company released to provide anonymized data from all their trips all over the world to shed light on topics such as analyzing holiday travel trends or visualizing access to healthy foods in certain cities.
Pontem Innovations work with companies to extract their insights and create visualizations to tell the story. Contact us today at info@ponteminnovations.ca and let’s talk about how you can integrate a data storytelling culture into your organization.