From the course: Presenting Data Effectively to Inform and Inspire
Make every presentation actionable
From the course: Presenting Data Effectively to Inform and Inspire
Make every presentation actionable
- Most of us don't present data as a hobby. We do it to enable decisions and actions. To do this, you don't want to just share what has happened or what is happening. Instead, you want to offer specific forecast and recommendations, which will help your audience know what to actually do with your data because that's why you're providing it, right, to enable better decisions. So suggest actions your audience can take with your data. Say you looked at data about the seasonality and the sales of ice cream in colder regions compared to warmer regions. And when you forecast that out, you find that regions with lower winter temperatures have significantly lower ice cream sales, surprise, but you also noticed that there's an exception in tourist towns where you have end cap product placement in the local supermarkets where there's no difference related to temperature change. So you recommend increasing end cap purchasing in the nine tourist areas where you're currently marketing ice cream which you forecast will result in an increase of revenues of $15 million next year. That was a nice specific example, right? And we already have a specific prediction and recommendation, right, so job done, or is it? Here's where you can make it even better. Instead, add a final segment to your presentation to really help your audience know exactly what to do with your data. Maybe this takes the form of a specific prioritize data-driven recommendation for which tourist areas to focus on in what order and even recommended spending on end cap marketing in each location. Or it could include a mention of who in the company to talk to about end cap marketing and maybe even start to lay out a schedule for the meetings and staffing for the effort. Uh, Bill, it sounds like you're saying I should start to go beyond the data and into things like leadership and management stuff. What does this have to do with presenting data? Yes, your scope creep detector is working well, young Jedi. The reason I recommend this is because sometimes managers handoff data analytics tasks thinking they're just technical tasks that can be outsourced to some analytics types and that they'll have to interpret the geeky math stuff that comes back and run with it on their own. But if you can be the person who's on top of the geeky math stuff and you can provide some of that translation into business needs and even begin to manage that process, you'll be adding immense value to your organization. This is where this work goes beyond being data presentations and starts being just presentations about important business stuff, which, yeah, sure, includes data. My goal is to make the data disappear. Just as I'm suggesting you forget the data when creating your data stories, often, you want your audience to sort of forget the data too. You want them focused on understanding insights, understanding the rationale for certain decisions and helping them make those decisions. Yeah, it's all about the data. Share the data. But help your audience rise above the data to focus on the ideas revealed by the data.
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