What would you prefer? A vague data dashboard reflecting on your business outcomes or a person gradually talking you through your company's data story? Obviously, we'll go for the easy-to-understand data storytelling strategy. Yes, that's why more and more businesses are taking up the emerging method over endless charts, dashboards, and visualization. Fortunately, data storytelling is seen as the skill set handcrafted for the era of big data.
Business organizations invest in analytics to get everyone on the same page. They want the employees to get a view of what is happening and what could be done to achieve success. Earlier, data dashboards were seen as the magic tool that provides insight into business progress. But the problem is that you need to interpret the numbers to understand what it means. Employees had a hard time because of this, and most of them gave up on data dashboards. On the other hand, data storytelling emerged as a solution that connects data points, synthesizes them, and easily explains them.
Storytelling is an art. Data storytelling is something that is making humans understand and get the in-depth content of big data. Experts say that data storytelling is the task of conveying data not just in numbers or charts, but as a narrative that humans can comprehend. Henceforth, laying the stone for conveying an effective data story starts from building a data culture. Even though data stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and are presented in an unbiased way, they often go ineffective because most people in the organization have a vague outlook about it. In order to change this, business companies should take the effective step to speed up the game and build a data culture on the premises that would help them better understand the data storytelling method.
Data storytelling is the fastest and the easiest way to use data to create new knowledge, and new decisions or actions. It empowers the company authorities and employees to both understand and act on data through the power of stories. It is an integrative method that incorporates knowledge and skills from several disciplines, including communication, analysis, and design. It triggers a data culture that helps employees create conversations about what matters, and frees them to work exactly on what they were hired for.
Besides, data storytelling is also easy for marketers to comprehend. When big data is at the center of data culture, it explains why and how it matters. It takes data, especially, numbers, and translates them to plain language stories that anyone can understand. Analytics Insight has listed some of the advantages of data storytelling in business.
Leverages meaning and value: Data storytelling helps companies connect the dots. It is the most effective way to communicate valuable insights and assign meaning and context to big data that otherwise lives as numbers in an excel spreadsheet at data centers.
Triggers uniqueness: The major aspect of a successful business is delivering unique products. Over the past few years, big data is seen as a tool that helps organizations come up with innovative solutions. When companies have proprietary data that no other brand has access to, they can tell a story that no one else can tell about the industry and its customers.
Communicates in many ways: The ability to communicate in many ways makes data stories easy to adopt. The insights can be delivered through white papers, annual reports, articles, videos, reports, brochures, case studies, infographics, presentations, etc.
We go for an inverted pyramid strategy to implement data storytelling in the company's culture. It is one of the most effective ways to drive a data culture that is both smooth and profitable. The inverted pyramid represents how data storytelling should first go to the authorities like CEO and then flow towards the employees. The higher authorities are bound to take the organization in a certain direction that paves the way for data stories. They should provide employees with the data that explains the company's strategy and let them know what's going to happen and why it's going to happen.
In order to leverage data culture, organizations should take efforts to make big data the core of decisions. A report suggests that around 48% of employees still rely on gut feeling to make decisions, and only 37% of employees trusted their decisions more when they were based on data. This makes way to a concept called 'data literacy' that is important to close the literacy gap. Today, data literacy is ranked eighth behind more analytics activities such as data strategy, data governance, advanced analytics capabilities, etc. Henceforth, by addressing the pain points and by developing a proper data culture, data storytelling can be streamlined in an organization.
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