Storytelling with Data

chapter oneunderstand the context

A little planning can go a long way and lead to more concise and effective communications. In our workshops, I find that we allocate an increasing amount of time and discussion on the very first lesson we cover, which focuses on context. People come in thinking they want data visualization best practices and are surprised by the amount of time we spend on—and that they want to spend on—topics related more generally to how we plan for our communications. By thinking about our audience, message, and components of content up front (and getting feedback at this early stage), we put ourselves in a better position for creating graphs, presentations or other data-backed materials that will meet our audience’s needs and our own.

The exercises in this chapter focus primarily on three important aspects of the planning process:

1. Considering our audience: identifying who they are, what they care about, and how we can better get to know them and design our communications with them in mind.
2. Crafting and refining our main message: the Big Idea was introduced briefly in SWD; here, we’ll undertake a number of guided and independent exercises to better understand and practice this important concept.
3. Planning content: storyboarding is another concept that was introduced in SWD—we’ll look at a number of additional examples and exercises related to what we include and how we organize it.

Let’s practice understanding the context!

First, we’ll review the main lessons ...