How To Tell a Compelling Story With Data
By: Marie Lefevre
Tags: Data Science, Data Visualization, Data Analysis, Data Journalism, Editors Pick

Step 1: Gather your thoughts

If you have conducted a certain data analysis, you should know why you initially started it. However this is easier said than done: sometimes you can lose track of the primary goal of an analysis as you move forward in data handling and interpretation. Don’t worry, I’ve been there before.

Therefore coming back to the WHY before the WHAT of you data analysis is a crucial step to start with. Ask yourself the following questions:

What question(s) are you trying to answer?

What goal(s) do you want to reach?

How is your data relevant in this context?

In my example, the reason why I conducted this data analysis is given by the context itself. My team needed to form four same-level groups of employees in order to allow everyone to get an Excel training with fellows having the same technical background. The question I had to answer was: how to best form four groups for this training? The goal I had to reach was to form homogeneous groups having the same number of individuals. To do so I would use the data at my disposal: data about employees’ seniority, proficiency level in Excel and average daily time spent on a computer.

© Marie Lefevre

Step 2: Identify your audience

In the way you want to tell your story, a key element to take into account are the individuals your data story is addressed to. One of the Cambridge Dictionary’s definitions for audience is the following: “the people, considered as a group, who watch or listen to a performance, movie, public event, etc., either together in one place or separately”. I want to underline the concept of group here. Particularly for data stories, all members of your audience may not have the same background to understand the technical elements of your data analysis.

So now that you clearly identified the WHY, let’s focus on the WHO. To define your audience you want to target with your story, you should ask yourselves the following questions:

What defines your audience as a group?

What type of knowledge (e.g. technical or industry-related) does your audience have upfront?

What additional value does your story provide them?

To come back to my previous example, the challenge for me was to convince my team’s boss that my methodology was the best way to split employees in four similar groups. This was a first test to then apply this methodology at a larger scale, so my story would be first addressed to my boss but ultimately it was possibly meant to be presented and applied at other departments. Hence my audience was composed of team leaders having a vague knowledge of data science (while I used k-means clustering in my analysis) and a very business-oriented mind. The additional value brought by my story would be to save time in building groups of individuals in the future.

Who’s Your Audience? Photo by Davide Ragusa on Unsplash

Step 3: Build your narrative

For this ultimate phase make sure that you have all the elements required for the content of your data story:

WHY: the fundamental reasons why this data story is relevant and the questions it answers

WHO: the audience this data story is addressed to and the way they should be addressed to

WHAT: the tangible elements of your data analysis presented in data visualizations (tables, graphs, pictures…)

Your ultimate mission, should you accept it, is to make all these elements fit into a consistent and compelling data story. Here you want to capture your audience’s attention not simply by presenting them an interesting story but also by telling them a story that truly fascinates them. To do so, let’s turn to the world of stories in literature or film. A commonly used dramatic structure is called the Freytag’s Pyramid. Under this structure, any story plot consists of five parts:

Exposition Rising action Climax Falling action Catastrophe or resolution

What you should focus on are the first, the third and the last elements of this pyramid, as they build your narrative’s core structure. Don’t hesitate to involve your audience along the whole story, for example by asking them what they would do at this or that moment of the story.

© Marie Lefevre

Despite the fact that my example is a very short data story (e.g. compared to a one-hour presentation of an extensive data analysis project) I applied this type of structure too. Here is how I built it: