How to plan your Data Driven Story with a set of useful templates
This templates have been summarized by professionals who work with data, develop news applications and civic data projects. Focused on data discovery, identifying the type of story you want to tell and on thinking about the audience first, they provide a easy to follow framework to plan your data driven projects.
Three Types of Templates
- User centered data project template: Organized by Miguel Paz, according to product development concepts outlined by Brian Boyer, and Jeff Gothelf in his book Lean UX. It’s important to note that most of this ideas come from the Agile software development community, human centered design and iterations in the world of startups.
- Finding stories in data templates: Developed by Rahul Bhargava for Data Therapy, one of his projects at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media, the worksheets of “Finding a story in data” are great ways to start planning your project.
- NPR’s Coverage Plan Templates: Developed by Eric Athas for NPR Training. Part of a great post: “Planning your newsroom project in 13 steps and with lots of sticky notes”
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Ten Questions Template
Data projects are defined by what sort of data you have and the questions you ask to the data to discover answers that fulfill your goals.
Ways to start
There are no written rules about which part triggers what. You may start with a question out of curiosity or a personal obsession or a tip that someone gave you: Do Tax Companies lobby in Congress? Do they give donations to Congressmen? How have this Congressmen voted any Tax Reform bills?
Or you may start with a dataset, like the ICIJ Data Team did with the largest data leak in history: the Panama Papers. They received 2.6 terabytes of information and before outlining what type of stories the network of more than 380 Journalists would do, the core team had to identify the type of documents, its formats and specific details (14 MM docs in 20 formats), extract the raw text and metadata using various techniques, put it in a database, set up ways to search and discover facts and just after all of that, start working in data products (database, key figures visualizations, games) and data stories.
Either way if you are doing a Data Project that is intended to serve an audience you must START by knowing what Data do you Have, Who are your users and What are their needs or problems. Always focus on the needs and problems first and then in the solution (How you will fulfill those needs). Then define if there are any constraints (like the data depends on a FOIA request or it would be too expensive and long to analyze it or you must pay for the database and there is no budget for that, etc.)
The following questions intend to serve you as a guideline to define the scope and characteristics of your Data Project. Answer all the questions and summarize them in a Manifesto. A Manifesto, like David Eads from NPR says, it’s “not a statement of work, a statement of purpose.” Here is an example Manifesto authored by Brian Boyer.
Key Questions to Plan your Data Project
- Do you have data and what characteristics does it have?
- Who are your users/audience?
- What are their needs or problems?
- How can you fulfill those needs with your project?
- What assumptions are you making?
- Do you have an hypothesis?
- Are there any constraints or blockers?
- Which is the minimum outcome (if you stumble with blockers) and maximum outcome (if everything goes well) of your project?
- Which is/are the best way/s to tell a story that serves your audience needs?
- Can you summarize your plan in a Manifesto, outlining the goals/ purpose, what you will do and not do and what does success look like?
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Finding a Story in Data Templates
This data templates were developed by Rahul Bhargava for Data Therapy, one of his projects at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. See here the original activity and templates.
What you need:
A real dataset that you care about
Define what type of stories you can tell with this dataset:
- Connection stories
- Comparison stories
- Change stories
- Personal stories
- Factoid stories
Now use the templates to answer the questions that will lead you to identifying what sort of data stories lay within your data.
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Finding a “Factoid” Story
Sometimes in large sets of data you find the most interesting thing is the story of one particular piece of information. This could be an “outlier” (a data point not like the others), or it could be the data point that is most common. A detail about one particular piece of your data can fascinate and surprise people. It can also give them an easier way to start thinking about the whole set of data.
- One factoid is that ………………
- This stands out from the rest of the data because ……………………….
- We want to tell this story because ……………………….
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Finding a “Interaction” Story
When two aspects of your data seem related, you can tell a story about how they interact. The fancy name for this is “correlation”. If one measure goes up, the other goes up too. If one goes down, the other goes down. If other cases, they might interact as opposites (when one goes up, the other goes down). You need to be careful not to guess about reasons for the interaction, but noticing the relationship itself can be a good story that connects things people otherwise don’t think about together.
- The two pieces of the data that interact are ………………………
- The interaction is………………………
- We want to tell this story because ……………………….
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Finding a “Comparison” Story
Comparing between sections of your data can a good way to find a story to tell. Often one part of your data tells one story, but another part tells a totally different story. Or maybe there is a smaller portion of your data that serves as an example of an overall pattern.
- The data to compare are ……… and …………
- Comparing these things shows that …………
- We want to tell this story because …………
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Finding a “Change” Story
People like to think about how things change over time. We experience and think about the world based on how we interact with it over time. Telling a story a story about change over time appeals to people’s interest in understanding what causes change, and they can often remember seeing the differences.
- The data show a change in………………………..
- The data changed from………….. to …………….
- We want to tell this story because…………………
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Finding a “Personal” Story
Some stories are interesting because they connect to your real life. Personalizing the story creates a connection to the real world meaning of the data and can be a powerful type of story for small audiences. Stories about someone’s personal experiences can make the data seem more real.
- The data say……………………
- This connects to real people because…………………..
- We want to tell this story because………………….
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Coverage Plan Template
Developed by the Eric Athas from NPR’s Training blog and detailed in a more extensive methodology post you should check ( “Planning your newsroom project in 13 steps and with lots of sticky notes”), this template has a more medium to long term purpose. It is focus on helping you plan a topic reporting and storytelling coverage for a given period of time.
Date(s) of planning session
How to use this document
Once completed, this document should guide your coverage. Use it to lead editorial meetings and to brainstorm story ideas. You can use it as a way to develop audience strategy and social media plans. It should be a living and breathing document. You can refine the themes and revisit them as you go. After a set period of time (3–6 months), revisit the coverage plan altogether. Consider going through the brainstorm exercise again from start to finish. You should consider scheduling that meeting today to be certain it doesn’t get away. Another way to stay on track is by holding regular (weekly) retrospectives where you ask what worked, what didn’t work and what would you do differently.
Mission Statement
Write the mission statement here
Over the next three months, [TEAM] will focus on the following three themes:
- Theme 1
- Theme 2
- Theme 3 (if you have a third)
What does success look like?
Describe success for your project. Include both qualitative and quantitative metrics.
Theme 1: [NAME]
Brief description
Who’s the audience?
List audiences here. The more specific, the better.
- Audiences listed here
How are you going to reach them?
List ideas here. Think about where your audiences are and how you can meet them there. What social media platforms do they prefer? What listservs do they subscribe to? What events do they attend? Who are the influencers they read, listen to and follow? Where do they gather?
- Ideas listed here
Story and project ideas
List your story ideas here. Write your ideas in headline form.
- Story ideas listed here
Theme 2: [NAME]
Brief description
Who’s the audience?
List audiences here. The more specific, the better.
- Audiences listed here
How are you going to reach them?
List ideas here. Think about where your audiences are and how you can meet them there. What social media platforms do they prefer? What listservs do they subscribe to? What events do they attend? Who are the influencers they read, listen to and follow? Where do they gather?
Ideas listed here
Story ideas
List your story ideas here. Write your ideas in headline form.
- Story ideas listed here
