What is Data Storytelling?
Data storytelling is a methodology for communicating information, tailored to a specific audience, with a compelling narrative.
Dashboards and spreadsheets only tell you what is happening. But, they do not tell you why.
Data Storytelling is the conclusion that makes all your data analysis meaningful and possibly the most important aspect.
With the rise of digital business and data-driven decision making, data storytelling has become a much-talked-about skill often associated with the Data Science and analytics community.
The idea is to connect the dots between sophisticated data analyses and decision makers, who may not have the ability to interpret the data.
Data storytelling merges three key fields of expertise:
Data science:
This field of expertise is the interdisciplinary field of sciences, which extracts knowledge and insight from data, making it readily available. This exciting field has made significant changes to our daily lives in the past couple of decades.
The technologies we take for granted are all driven by this field of expertise, but there is one thing that data scientists are not naturally skilled in: Storytelling.
Data scientists are often skilled at, collecting and delivering data, but lack the skills to relay a true understanding of the opportunities hidden in the data delivered.
Visualisations:
The emergence of technology solutions such as dashboards became a natural solution in aiding us to comprehend our vast amounts of data collected. Transforming data into graphs, pie, and line charts meant we could see our data like never before, however, alone data visualisations have limitations. They provided at-a-glance snapshots of data, lacking the context needed to explain why something has happened.
Narrative:
The third and, somewhat, most vital part of a data story is the narrative. Narrative uses language in a format that suits our particular needs, augmenting our full comprehension of new information. A narrative is a key vehicle to convey insights, with visualisations and data being important proof points.
Why you need Data Storytelling?
Once your business has started collecting and combining all kinds of data, the next elusive step is to extract value from it. Your data may hold tremendous amounts of potential value, but none can be created unless insights are uncovered and translated into actions or business outcomes.
Data Storytelling can help you achieve the necessary emotional connection with a group of investors.
You can also clearly explain to your website visitors the benefits of your app and prepare proper onboarding by using well-designed narrative.
It can be the difference between an unmemorable data set and establishing precise points for decision making
How can Data Storytelling help your organisation?
Data storytelling is the fastest and best way to empower your team to both understand and act on data through the power of stories.
It builds a data-driven and transparent culture, creates conversations about what matters, and frees your people to do what they were hired to do.
