Create Meaningful Content 117
Numbers can be captivating if you move beyond just
spouting the data. According to Now You See It author
Stephen Few, “As providers of quantitative business
information, it is our responsibility to do more than sift
through the data and pass it on; we must help our read-
ers gain the insight contained therein. We must design
the message in a way that leads readers on a journey of
discovery, making sure that what’s important is clearly
seen and understood. Numbers have an important story
to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convinc-
ing voice.”
12
Numbers rarely speak for themselves. How big is a bil-
lion? How does that figure compare to others? What
causes the numbers to go up or down? You can leave
it up to individual interpretation, or you can explain the
bumps, anomalies, and trends by accompanying them
with narrative.
There are a few ways to explain the narrative in
the numbers:
Scale:• Nowadays, we casually throw around pro-
foundly large (and minutely small) numbers. Explain
the grandness of scale by contrasting it with items
of familiar size.
WaterPartner.org’s 2008 animation: “This year,
1 white girl will be kidnapped in Aruba, 4 will die
in shark attacks, 79 will die of Avian flu, 965 will
die in airplane crashes, 14,600 will lose their lives
in armed conflict, 5,000,000 will die from water-
related disease. That’s a tsunami twice a month or
five Hurricane Katrinas each day, or a World Trade
Center disaster every four hours. Where are the
headlines? Where is our outrage? Where is our
humanity?” www
Move from Data to Meaning
Compare:• Some numbers sound deceptively small or
large until they’re put into context by comparing them
to numbers of similar value in a different context.
Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini’s 2010 CES Presentation:
“Today we have the industry’s first-shipping 32-
nanometer process technology. A 32-nanometer
microprocessor is 5,000 times faster; its transistors
are 100,000 times cheaper than the 4004 processor
that we began with. With all respect to our friends
in the auto industry, if their products had produced
the same kind of innovation, cars today would go
470,000 miles per hour. They’d get 100,000 miles
per gallon and they’d cost three cents. We believe
that these advances in technology are bringing us
into a new era of computing.”
Context:• Numbers in charts go up and down or get
bigger and smaller. Explaining the environmental and
strategic factors that influence the changes gives the
numbers meaning.
Duarte Founder Mark Duarte’s Vision Presentation:
When rolling out the 2010 vision, Mark showed a
graphic depicting four bold strategic moves the organ-
ization had taken every five years since its founding
twenty years ago. He explained how each strategic
span of five years formed the corporate values. Then,
he overlaid historic revenue trends over the same five-
year increments showing how Duarte weathered each
economic storm, emphasizing the role each strategic
surge created in growth and opportunity. There was
little resistance in understanding why the next five-year
plan was worth supporting.
Telling the narrative implied in the numbers helps others
see the meaning of the numbers.
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