Show and tell: Sharing stories with compelling data

A long data-based report that communicators spend a lot of time on can end up being useless if it’s not easy for the recipient to understand and apply to their work. During Ragan’s Communications Boot Camp Virtual Conference last year, Andrew Bates, senior director of enterprise data strategy at AARP, said that communicators need to know how to look past the “nice to know” material in front of them and focus on the data and formats and visuals that’ll move a narrative forward.

“What is your time worth?” Bates said. “It does take a lot of time to build a template at the beginning and evolve that a little bit. But once you use some of the tools available to you, build out a template and figure out your color palette, you can take the important business intelligence and get that into the visual format that’s going to help leaders actually pay attention.”

Bates added that communicators need to ask themselves what the reader needs to get out of the material before getting started.