Data Storytelling: The Way to Stakeholders’ Hearts (Part 1)
Motivating stakeholders to act on your recommendations
A story is a fact wrapped in an emotion that compels us to take an action that transforms our world — Richard Maxwell & Robert Dickman
Why this article?
In this article, you’ll understand the meaning of data stories and the difference between stakeholders and audiences.
Have you taken your whole time and energy to analyze the data in your company but your insights and recommendations don’t end up getting used? Maybe you’re angry at this and feel like you’re wasting your time in the company and feel useless. “It’s their fault! They never listen to me,” you say.
Pause.
It might be the fault of the stakeholders. Or maybe it’s not them. It could be you. You could be making presentations that have no direction. Or you could be showing them dashboards and expecting them to understand what they are seeing. Don’t get me wrong. You need dashboards sometimes but one thing you should know is dashboards don’t tell stories and you need stories to make your stakeholders act.
In the recently concluded Devfest Enugu 2022 event, Eliel and I spoke on the topic: Data storytelling: The way to stakeholders’ hearts. But we didn’t have enough time to go into full details so I’ll be doing that in a series.
In this series, I’ll be covering the What, Why, When, and How of Data Storytelling. But we need to start somewhere right? So I’ll be starting with the What of Data Storytelling in this article.
So let’s kick off, shall we?
What is a Data Story?
The movies you watch and the fiction books you read are stories. Imagine the last movie you watched or the last fiction book you read, what change did you notice before and after watching or reading it? What emotions did you sense?
You might have felt angry, sad, or happy and your perspective about certain things must have changed. That’s what stories do to you. It changes the way you view things by igniting certain emotions.
Just like how story writers change you with their stories. You should change your stakeholders with your data stories. There’s only a slight difference between stories and data stories. The difference is data.
The fiction books you read have ‘narrative’ as their basic attribute while the movies have both ‘narrative’ and ‘visuals’. According to Brent Dykes, a well-known data storyteller, data stories have three basic building blocks: Data, Narrative, and Visuals.
The Data is what your story is built on. Whatever insights and recommendations you tell your stakeholders are influenced by your data. The narrative is the written or spoken words you’ll use to communicate effectively. The visuals aid your communication. You can’t show your stakeholders rows and columns of data to make your point. You need visuals (mostly charts in the case of data stories).
You’ve known the components of data stories but let’s take a quick look at who the stakeholders are.
Who are the Stakeholders?
There’s a difference between an audience and a stakeholder
Yes, they usually say (and I still agree with them) that before crafting your data stories, you should know your target audience. But why am I interested in making your data stories get to the hearts of stakeholders, and not your audience?
Audiences are individuals that have no influence on decisions in an organization. They sit down, listen to you, probably clap for you and that’s it. No action.
However, stakeholders are individuals that influence and are influenced by decisions made in the organization. In this context of data storytelling, we are more interested in stakeholders because we wouldn’t want you to waste your time crafting and presenting that fantastic data story without action, right?
Even though you now have an understanding of their differences, you still need to be careful. Stakeholders could cover lots of categories of individuals in an organization so it’s most important for you to focus on stakeholders that influence decisions (not those influenced) in the organization.
Here’s a quick example…
In a case where the resolution time by the customer care agents in an organization is usually delayed because the agents have inconvenient working hours, there are several stakeholders involved.
They include the C-executives, team managers, customer care agents and even the customers. However, your data story would most likely be targeted at the C-executives because the working hours of these agents can only be changed with their approval.
You’ve known the components of data stories and now understand what stakeholders are. But it doesn’t stop there. Why should you think of using data stories as a data professional?
We would be treating that in the next article. So click away to learn more about data storytelling!
