Stephen Few, an innovator, author, a teacher, and data visualization expert, once said," Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice." Facts and figures are very important in the business world, but they rarely make a lasting impression. To create strong communications that make people think and convince them to take action, you need data storytelling. Data storytelling is communicating the meaning of a data set with visuals and a narrative that are customized for each particular audience. A narrative is another word for a story. In this video, you'll learn about data storytelling steps. These are: engage your audience, create compelling visuals, and tell the story in an interesting way. Here's an example from the music streaming industry. Some companies send their customers a year in review email. It highlights the songs the users have listened to most and sometimes congratulate them for being a top fan of a particular artist. This is a much more exciting way to share data than just a printout of the customer's activity. It also reminds the listener about how much time they spend enjoying the service, a great way to build customer loyalty. Here's another example, some ride-sharing companies are using data storytelling to show their customers how many miles they've traveled and how that equals spending less money on gas, reducing carbon emissions and saving time they might otherwise have spent fighting traffic. It makes it really easy for the rider to clearly see the value of the service in the simple and fun visual. Data stories like these keep the customer engaged and make them feel like their choices matter because the companies are taking the time to create something just for them, and importantly, the stories are interesting. Knowing how to reach people in this way is an essential part of data storytelling. Images can draw us in at a subconscious level. This is the concept of engaging people through data visualizations. So far you've been learning about the importance of focusing on your audience. Coming up, you'll keep building on that knowledge, you'll discover that there are three data storytelling steps, and the first is knowing how to engage your audience. Engagement is capturing and holding someone's interest and attention. When your audience is engaged, you're much more likely to connect with them and convince them to see the same story you see. Every data story should start with audience engagement, all successful storytellers consider who's listening first. For instance, when a kindergarten teacher is choosing books for their class. they'll pick ones that are appropriate for five-year-olds. If they were to choose high school level novels, the complex subject matter would probably confuse the kids and they'd get bored and tune out. The second step is to create compelling visuals. In other words, you want to show the story of your data, not just tell it. Visuals should take your audience on a journey of how the data changed over time or highlight the meaning behind the numbers. Here's an example, let's say a cosmetic company keeps track of stores that buy its product and how much they buy. You could communicate the data to others in a spreadsheet like this, or you could create a colorful visual such as this pie chart, which makes it easy to see which stores are most and least profitable as business partners. That's a much clearer and more visually interesting approach. Now, the third and final step is to tell the story in an interesting narrative. A narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It should connect the data you've collected to the project objective and clearly explain important insights from your analysis. To do this, it's important that your data storytelling is organized and concise. Soon you'll learn how to do that using slides for discussion during a meeting and a formal presentation. We'll discuss how the content, visuals and tone of your message changes depending on the way you're communicating it. And speaking of business communications, one of the many ways that companies use visualization to tell data stories, is with word clouds. Word clouds are a pretty simple visualization of data. These words are presented in different sizes based on how often they appear in your data set. It's a great way to get someone's attention and to unlock stories from big blocks of text where each word alone could never be seen. Word clouds can be used in all sorts of ways. On social media, they can show you which topics show up in posts most often, or you can use them in blogs to highlight the ideas that interest readers the most. This word cloud was created using text from the syllabus of this course. It tells a pretty engaging story where data analytics, analysis, SQL and spreadsheets are, unsurprisingly, some of the lead characters. Let's continue turning the pages of your data analytics story. There's lots of action and adventure to come.
