Informing and Inspiring Action
Originally posted on Issue №6 — September 2022
In my favorite book about data, Data Story, Nancy Duarte makes a couple key points in the opening pages:
- Facts aren’t as memorable as stories — studies have found stories to be 13x more memorable than individual statistics!
- We can’t rely on data to tell its own story — it needs a storyteller (that’s you)
The point of data isn’t just to sound smart; it’s to inform smart decisions. But even if you’ve got the best data in the world, if you can’t communicate the actionable insights, what’s the point?
The secret is storytelling. You have to both inform and inspire action.
Over the past couple years, this has been one of the biggest lessons learned at Neighborhood Nexus. We can’t just throw all the data at you and expect it to make sense. We have to curate data more actively and contextualize it with narrative.
It’s not enough to make information accessible, we have to make it exceedingly actionable. And stories can do that.
And that’s what we’re trying to do with the newly launched Metro Atlanta Racial Equity Atlas. Systemic inequities are complex and interconnected, thus often difficult to communicate. Along with Partnership for Southern Equity and ARCHI, we’re building a tool that uses local narratives contextualized by regional data to inspire and inform action. The narratives and data follow threads through the interwoven fabric of our region’s most critical issues.
How do you tell stories with data?
