don't hide the crucial findings

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When choosing a particular graph type, there are no hard and fast rules. With so many options available, it can be tempting to select a visual that you’ve used in the past or turn to what you believe is the correct chart to use. However, this can lead to critical elements in your data being difficult to find—or worse, completely hidden from view.

I came across this recently, as shown in the example:

 
pie chart showing pipeline breakdown across region and stage
 

This data is from a small company that is looking to get a sense of its sales pipeline across its four regions–North, South, East and West. The data is broken into five categories which relate to the progression of any given opportunity–Prospect, Conversation, Presentation, Agreement and Formal Offer. 

The pipeline composition is expected to have minor variations between regions, but the proportion of opportunities at each stage should be consistent overall. Any notable discrepancies should be flagged to management immediately. 

Does this set of pies make it easy to find these discrepancies? Likely not; if you were able to identify some elements of interest, it took some considerable time to do so.

Reading a single pie has its challenges by virtue of how you consume it using a combination of the respective slices area and arc length.  The addition of multiple pies makes this task even more difficult as the elements you are looking to compare, the pipeline stages, are separated and located in different places on each pie.

And while you should look for alternative visualisations to avoid this complex comparison, on occasion you might find your audience demanding to see a pie. If that’s the case you can take steps to make that comparison slightly easier.

 
improved pie chart showing pipeline breakdown across region and stage
 

With minor formatting changes and logical sorting of the data (clockwise by natural pipeline progression, rather than alphabetically), you have a greater chance of finding pockets of inconsistencies within the regions. For example, if you were to look at the East region you might get a sense that the later stages, Formal Offer and Agreement do seem to be lower than the other regions.

While this view is better, you still have the challenge of comparing multiple pies. It’s at this stage that you might consider an alternative visual that allows more efficient comparison.

 
100% stacked bar chart showing pipeline breakdown across region and stage
 

This 100% stacked bar view accomplishes the objective of showing the pipeline stages as a part of a whole. Evaluation of the pipeline across regions is a substantially easier task here than in the four pies. We can take advantage of two distinct baselines: the first from 0% looking to the right; the second, from 100% looking back to the left. 

It’s the view from that second baseline that makes the problem facing the East region clear: the final two stages combined, Agreement and Formal Offer, represent barely 15% of their pipeline, compared with an average of nearly 30% across the other three regions. In addition, you can see that a notable amount of the East pipeline is in the Conversation and Presentation stages. This is alarming and shows that the short-term prospects in this region are bleak. Management needs to be informed. 

By changing the graph, you have discovered a key finding. Now that you have a clear visual and accompanying message, you need to take steps to turn it into a communication that will make the focus unavoidable and the action to management clear.

For the explanatory visual, you’ll want to direct your audience’s attention to the final two pipeline stages, with an emphasis on the East region. You can reorder the bars so that East is at the top, where it will be most prominent. Then, visually fade out the other three regions (with slight transparency or with slightly less intense colours in the same hue).

 
100% stacked bar chart showing pipeline breakdown across region and stage with focus applied to agreement and formal offer
 

To create an executive summary slide, include this version of the graph with some accompanying words articulating a clear takeaway title and call to action. In this case, you could call for a surge of sales support in the East to help tackle the backlog at the Conversation and Presentation stages; this would allow the pipeline to be pushed through at a quicker pace.

 
Exec summary slide showing clear call to action
 

This critical information had been present in the graphs all along, but it was not easily retrievable to us, or our audience. By choosing a more appropriate visual and taking steps to call attention to this information, you’ve been able to highlight an important finding to your audience and propose actions to remedy the concern. 

 
 

If you’d like to practice implementing these steps, browse the related Excel file to experiment with the datasets and created graphs. 

For more examples of visual transformations, check out the before-and-afters in our makeover gallery. Then, practice honing your data storytelling skills by undertaking an exercise in the SWD community.

what clutter can we eliminate?

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Final days to register for the May 5th in-person *storytelling & presenting data* masterclass in Chicago! Join Cole and the SWD team for our last in-person public workshop of the year for a magical & energizing day of learning & practicing telling stories with data.

Clutter is exhausting. We typically think of clutter as the accumulation of “stuff” in our homes—our closets, our attics, our garages, under sinks, the storage area that was once a dining room table, the alleged “to donate” pile, etc.  While most of it served a useful purpose at one time, those days are now a distant memory.

This has been top of mind lately, as I’ve been preparing to move to a new house. This has prompted some insightful conversations between my husband and me about why we’re compelled to hold onto things. For example, I found a box of outdated operating systems CD-ROMS, many of which I’d had since college. While I agonized over tossing something that I’d held onto for all this time, my husband simply asked, “Under what circumstances do you think you’ll want to reinstall Windows XP on any device you currently own?”  Point made. 

Why is clutter so hard for us to let go of? Perhaps because we think something has always been there, so it must belong there and we’re afraid of what might happen if we eliminate it. Or perhaps we don’t have a good framework for evaluating whether something is useful or not. 

This same concept applies to our graphs and business communications. We tend to blindly accept the default settings of our tools and very rarely consider if the included elements actually have a purpose. The “Windows XP” question, in this case, is: does this element add enough informative value to make up for its presence?” 

For example, consider the following chart and take note of your process as you intake the data.

If you’re like me, your eyes are probably drawn first to the three lines. Then I jumped down to the data table at the bottom, looking for a legend. Once I found it, my eyes were pulled to the right into the data table. Then I started going back and forth between the data table and the graph, trying to tie specific numbers to the individual data markers. It was only then that I realized I didn’t fully understand how to interpret the metric that was being graphed, so I went back to the top and looked to the chart title and subheader for context. That’s a lot of work! 

We’ve written previously about the measurable benefits of reducing clutter, so let’s turn now to the nitty-gritty of making this graph more effective. What elements are not essential? What could be stripped away allowing the data to stand out more? What other changes might you recommend? The following progression shows how I’d declutter:

STEP 1: remove heavy borders and gridlines

STEP 2: eliminate data markers

STEP 3: remove the redundant data table. For considerations on its usefulness, check out this practice exercise. I’ll also take the opportunity here to add explicit labels on the x and y axes.

STEP 4: improve the chart title. I’ll align it to start at the top of the vertical y-axis (rather than it hanging out in space in the center) and decrease the size of the font in the subheader. I’ll also not leave the audience questioning how to interpret the data but specifying that this is a cumulative measure—context that was not originally displayed.

STEP 5: move the legend closer to the data

STEP 6: tie the labels to the data using the same color

Check out the impact of all these changes:

There’s more we can do to improve this graph, including showing our audience where to look through sparing use of color, words and other design choices. But simply reducing the nonessential elements in our visuals means they are more likely to be used—unlike my CD-ROM of Windows XP, which is currently in my recycling can.

For more on decluttering, check out strip away the nonessential and some Excel tactical steps. Get hands-on practice with the community exercise declutter!

the true beauty of a communications makeover

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Clients look to us to help them make their charts and graphs look better. That's what most folks think "data visualization" means in our world today. Though that is part of our job, it's not the whole story. While the majority of our focus may be on modifying graphs and presentations, fruitful communication with data goes beyond simply polishing up a graphic.

Think about how we interact at work. We don't just send slide decks back and forth. We work on shared spreadsheets and documents, suggesting remarks and altering them cooperatively. We attend in-person and virtual conferences, chat with our coworkers, and use specialized tools like Slack, Teams, Trello, Airtable and Mural to keep us organized. And yes: most of us still employ the good old-fashioned email.

Regardless of the format, we have to make sure our message is clear and easy to understand, and that it resonates with our audience. It's a lesson we emphasize in our public and custom workshops alike, and it's one I recently had the opportunity to explore in more detail.

Case study: performance report card

The client in question was a team within a large organization with franchised retail locations worldwide. They wanted assistance improving the effectiveness of their communications for a current performance initiative. They had been sending out a quarterly email to a subset of franchisees that was supposed to be motivational, but it was not generating the hoped-for response. 

For clarity’s sake, I’ll explain the context piece by piece:

  • Who was the team sending the communications? The Global Franchise Support Team (GFST), a corporate-level group that helped franchisees and employees meet customer service goals, and thus help the organization maintain a positive brand image worldwide.

  • What were they using to generate the emails? A system called CAP that tracked franchise performance, goals, and action plans…and, crucially, can send out personalized, automated emails.

  • Why were these messages being sent?  At the time, GFST was running an optional initiative called “Developing In-Store Confidence (DISCO)”, focused on educating team members at the store level about the company’s product lines. GFST believed that having a more knowledgeable front-line sales staff interacting with shoppers would improve overall customer satisfaction. To help franchisees stay on top of their goals, CAP would email each of them a quarterly, individualized DISCO report card.

  • What did GFST hope the outcome of these emails would be?  The goal of the message was to motivate franchisees to stay focused on improving their customer service metrics. The email would also prompt recipients to create, maintain, and share in the CAP system their specific action plans for ensuring that DISCO targets would be met or exceeded in the following quarter. 

To summarize: the corporate office (GFST) used a software program (CAP) to keep track of and send emails about every participating franchisee’s performance against specific customer service goals (DISCO). 

Here’s a sample email from that system below. As you read through it, keep a couple of questions in mind:

  1. What caught your attention at first glance?

  2. What message or messages do you think are the most important for the recipient of this email to focus on?

Here’s the email:

 
 

 (Note: details have been modified to maintain confidentiality.)

Where were your eyes drawn?

Look away from the email and then quickly look back at it. What did you notice first? Were your eyes immediately drawn to certain text, colors, or images? Different people will likely notice different things, but a few elements pop more than others: 

  • The “celebration” graphic in the top right (bold and colorful)

  • The big button to “update your progress”

  • The actual DISCO scores (large, with visual padding surrounding them)

What were the key messages?

As I processed this email, I found several messages. Two struck me as likely to be the most important to the recipients (the franchisees):

  • Congratulations! Your scores are above “unacceptable thresholds”

  • Actual scores with variance to thresholds

Others are probably less important to the franchisees, but would matter to the sender (the GFST team): 

  • Thank you for participating in the DISCO initiative

  • Here’s how to access your action plan 

  • Here’s how to share news of your store’s success with GFST

  • Feedback survey

Our eyes should be drawn to the key messages

By examining the distinct messages within this email, we realized that some of the essential points, from the recipient’s point of view, were being lost while others that were not as consequential drew too much attention.


Message in the email (from top to bottom)		 Is it important to the recipient? Does it draw your attention?
Thanks for participating no YES
You're above unacceptable thresholds YES no
Here's how to access your action plan sort of sort of
Here's how to share news of your success with GFST sort of no
Your actual scores for this quarter YES YES
Take the feedback survey no no

This was an “aha moment” for several people during the workshop. In crafting the email template, the GFST team hadn’t focused on what would matter most to the franchisees. Instead, the emphasis was on action items that GFST cared about, regardless of how much or how little the message recipients might value them.

(One tool you can use to think through these issues—what do we care about, vs. what does our audience care about—is the Big Idea worksheet, which challenges us to get very specific about our intended message before we build out our communication.)

Rebuild the email, with a focus on mutual interests

We started our email revisions by taking into account the needs and interests of franchisees and the corporate office alike, allowing us to identify and rank three mutually important messages: 

  1. Congratulations! Your scores are above “unacceptable thresholds”

  2. Here are your actual scores (with variance to thresholds)

  3. This is how you access and update your action plan

 
 

With these three messages agreed upon, we began our redesign by giving each one its own section of the email. Creating a spatial distinction among them lent a clear visual hierarchy to the communication that was easily scannable and understandable for a reader.

Redesign section 1: Congratulations!

It’s human nature to want to be recognized and appreciated for doing good work. There’s an opportunity to do that here, by beginning the communication on a positive and personal note. That was the focus of the redesign of this first portion of the communication.

 
 

We changed the "Congratulations!" message to recognize the franchise leader and their team's performance, rather than their participation in an enterprise-wide initiative. Design-wise, we removed the borders and clip art, which gave us more room to make the “congratulations” text bigger and bolder. We also used boldface sparingly—the original version was entirely bolded—to draw positive attention to the recipient personally, thus creating a good first impression.

Redesign section 2: Your scores were great!

Next came the actual scores: the reasons for the congratulations. 

 
 

One of the best aspects of the original email was that the numeric scores were presented as big, bold numbers. We enhanced that in the new version, adding a number line to show how the franchise’s actual scores compared to the goals. To further emphasize the scores’ importance, we moved them “above the fold,” so that they would be visible immediately without scrolling when the email was opened. 

We changed the accompanying text to say that the scores “beat the Quality Assurance thresholds for Q3 of 2022,” instead of framing it negatively (“your scores are both trending above Quality Assurance unacceptable thresholds”). For good measure, we added “Great work!”

Blue type distinguishes this section from the previous one. Readers generally assume that when items in an email (or on a page or a screen) are the same color, they are related. With this approach, we differentiate sections from one another without resorting to the use of clunky borders, background tints, horizontal rules, or other extra elements that would clutter the page or screen.

Redesign section 3: Here’s how to update your action plan

We've already shared two essential and positive messages, so our audience probably feels good by this point in the email. But now it's time to shift the focus to GFST's request: that franchisees keep their plans up-to-date on the CAP system.

It can be difficult to encourage people to complete tasks that don't appear to benefit them. That’s why we decided to put this particular section third, believing that it would be easier to motivate franchisees to take action here if they were already feeling the goodwill from the previous two sections.

Here’s what the third section looked like after the remake:

 
 

This part of the email now kicks off with a general call to action. Following up on the good news from prior sections, we immediately use that positive feeling to encourage recipients to “Keep the momentum going!” by completing a few distinct action items. (The original email lacked this direct request.) 

We emphasized certain words and used a numbered list format to make the next steps easier to find and read; the original email listed them out in a paragraph. We found a more intuitive place for the “update your progress” button in this version of the email (right after the instructions on what to do). Rather than being distracting, it is easier to spot, and will likely facilitate participation by making the call-to-action easier to address immediately.

Again, notice that we used a single, distinct color for all the messaging in this section. Not coincidentally, it’s the same color as the GFST logo. This helps to subtly link the content of this part of the email to the office that is requesting these actions of the franchisee.

Add a section 4: By the way…

Our original email also included a link to a survey. It didn’t seem especially important to either GFST or the recipients, but we didn’t feel comfortable removing it entirely. Instead, we made some slight cosmetic changes to it and kept it at the very end of the email, following section 3 and all in black:

 
 

The full redesign: before and after

No single step of this makeover was a drastic change on its own. In combination, though, the modifications resulted in a clearer and more audience-focused communication. This version is likely to leave recipients with a more positive impression, and GFST with franchisees who are more amenable to both improving their performance and keeping the CAP system up to date.

Compare the version of the email we started with with the version after our changes were implemented:  

It's easy to understand the satisfaction of turning a dull graph into a delightfully crafted visual, but transforming other types of communication can be just as exhilarating and satisfying. 

Here, getting from “before” to “after” involved only a slight change to the framing of the messages and to the layout of the design elements. Most of the improvement came directly from considering the needs and interests of the audience, as well as the needs and interests of the sender.  

Aesthetically beautiful communications can sometimes fail, just as utilitarian communications can sometimes succeed. The true “beauty” of a communications makeover isn’t in how it looks, but in how close to perfectly it achieves its intended purpose.

a diverging bar chart makeover: how to tackle the challenge of scope creep

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Have you ever found yourself looking at a graph for the first time and felt immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information presented?  It can leave you wondering not only how to understand it, but also what decisions led to the creation of such a complex visual in the first place.  

Nobody sets out to make a confusing communication. Most dashboards or visuals start out quite simple…but over time they may be leveraged to do more, provide more info, and support more requirements all at once. After all that, by the time you encounter it for the first time, it’s thoroughly impenetrable.  

“Scope creep” is a blight that affects almost every organisation. During one of the recurring meetings that discuss the monthly report, someone requests new requirements. In the next month’s version of the report, there are additional slides providing an additional layer of insight. Through inertia or a loss of institutional memory, even if that insight is no longer necessary, the charts persist and are regularly updated; meanwhile, more new requirements regularly arise. 

Sound familiar? This cycle can continue with further elements or more granular breakdowns being added. Creating the report takes more and more time and causes feelings of resentment and dissatisfaction from those tasked with doing so, as more manual updates, positioning of labels, and quality assurance are required for each refresh.  

How do we tackle the challenge of scope creep, and bring overly ambitious and complicated slides back to a level of usefulness and clarity for everyone?

An example of this kind of visual came across our desks recently. Here it is below.

Image of a diverging bar chart showing 10 UK locations and the comparison of room bookings between 2019 and 2022

This data is from a hotel chain with locations across the UK. As with most analysis currently being conducted in the hospitality industry, the comparison here centers on the current year's data versus an equivalent position from 2019—the last “normal” year before the global pandemic. The original brief was to easily show if there are any cities that have notable differences in room booking numbers between the two years, and to assess the composition of bookings by room type. Gradually, as more and more labels and comparisons were added, these original goals became more difficult to find.

One challenge currently facing us is the chart selection. This particular diverging bar chart (also known as a tornado chart or butterfly chart) allows for a straightforward comparison of cities within a single year. For example, in 2019 (the leftward-pointing bars), it’s immediately apparent that London has the highest number of room bookings, followed by Birmingham and then Manchester. Comparing cities across the two years, however, is far more difficult. Without the use of the labels, did Portsmouth book more rooms in 2019 or 2022? 

Within a city, the subdivisions of bars represent bookings by room type. The room type closest to the baseline, “single rooms,” is the only one that can easily be compared across cities, since it is the only one with a common baseline. Other room comparisons are difficult to achieve without referring to the data labels. 

What would you do in order to make this chart less intimidating and overwhelming for a first-time viewer?

You can improve the graph’s readability by thinking about what dimensions of the data are critical for your audience to compare, and making that easy to achieve by intentionally placing those elements close together. Considering that the audience is used to seeing this data represented in stacked bars, you may choose to stay in the same neighbourhood with your revised view. One approach would be to group the bars together by location, rather than diverging away from one another. (One added benefit of moving away from diverging bars for years is that the graph becomes more versatile…after all, what direction would you go if there were ever a third year that needed to be included?)

Grouped bar chart comparing the differences in room booking between 2019 and 2022 for each UK location

Without the data labels, the bigger trends are easier to see—like, for instance, the increase in room bookings in Portsmouth, which was challenging to assess before. Changing the sort to something meaningful (i.e., in descending order of room bookings by city in 2022) highlighted something that could have been easily missed: single room bookings in London have decreased since 2019, from around 60 to approximately 10. By being more mindful of the way you visually organise the data, you can uncover potentially actionable insights like this one, which would have been nearly impossible to see otherwise.

A better understanding of the data has been achieved and some interesting insights have been discovered, but there is still a lot of information here. Given our audience’s interest in the overall room bookings, you might consider alternative visuals that use fewer colours, and don’t break down the data to such a granular level. 

Connected dot plot showing variance in room bookings between 2019 and 2022 for each UK location

A connected dot plot allows a straightforward comparison of the change in room bookings for each location. Consider that since 2019, London, Cardiff, and Oxford have all had notable positive increases in room bookings, while Liverpool, Birmingham, and most noticeably Manchester have seen a marked reduction. 

The year-to-year differences are harder to see in the smaller hotels, since the larger capacity locations dominate the visible range of the scale. You could solve this by focusing not on tallies of bookings, but instead on the percentage by which bookings increased or decreased in each location from 2019 to 2022.

Slopegraph showing the percentage variance between 2019 and 2022 for hotel room bookings in 10 UK locations
 

The slopegraph provides a clear emphasis on the change between 2019 and 2022. Some hotels have recovered quickly from the pandemic and are establishing positive growth compared with 2019, but there are also those that are continuing to suffer from lower uptake. Indeed, as further exploration is conducted on this view, a geographical split is emerging between the hotels in the north of England and those in the south. All of the hotels in the south have seen a positive change whereas the opposite is true with their northern counterparts. Thinking back to the key objectives from the audience, this is a critical find and steps should be taken to update hotel management accordingly. 

This would be a good time to think back to that decrease in single room bookings in London. You’ll likely want to develop an appropriate view to make this finding clear, as single room occupation in London from business travellers was historically a high contributor to room bookings.

Stacked bar char showing the room type composition for London.
 

The stacked bar chart provides a clear view of the total room bookings and the positive story that overall bookings have increased. When you intentionally order and selectively colour the room types in the stack, however, you can also make this concerning decrease in single room bookings (from 64 to 12) clearly visible and attention-drawing.

Having been cognisant throughout of those original audience goals, you were able to use a variety of chart types to identify two compelling stories, which can now be presented to the hotel management team in a clear and impactful way with a recommendation for an intended course of action.

Final executive summary slide displaying our key findings from the original

All of this data was present in the original visual, but multiple cycles of revisions and added layers of detail had buried the critical insights deep inside of it. Your focus on bringing your audience’s most valued comparisons to the foreground, and eliminating the less-important or extraneous material, made exploration of the data easier, and the findings more relevant. This process ultimately involved making different chart choices before creating a final slide centred on these actionable insights, rather than on the data outputs alone. 

 
 

If you’d like to practice implementing these steps, browse the related Excel file to experiment with the datasets and created graphs.

For more examples of visual transformations, check out the before-and-afters in our makeover gallery. Then, practice honing your data storytelling skills by undertaking an exercise in the SWD community.

from dashboard to story

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More and more organizations are turning to dashboards for monitoring performance and enabling data exploration. These user-friendly reporting tools offer a ton of advantages over older ways of doing things: they can dynamically update to display the latest information, link together multiple views of data, and often incorporate interactivity that lets users filter and zoom in on what they want to explore. 

As powerful and as useful as dashboards are, they’re optimized for the exploration of data, not the communication of specific insights. Once we’ve used our dashboards to uncover something worth sharing, we’ll usually be better served by making a separate presentation, designed to bring the findings to light and get others to act upon the information.

The path from dashboard to story might not always be intuitive. This article will use a dashboard from a recent storytelling with data engagement to illustrate how to transform dashboard insights into an action-inspiring story. 

First, some background: a fitness chain created a dashboard to monitor weekly performance metrics for a personal training program. In this program, clients at the fitness center register to attend one-on-one sessions with a certified trainer. 

Filters at the top of the dashboard allow users to select and analyze specific locations and trainers. Overall summary measures are shown in prominent colored boxes just below the filters, and there are four charts that provide time-trended views and aggregated metrics by week, trainer, and location.

With this dashboard and others like it, exploring the data was much easier than ever before, but the client found it challenging to translate the results of that exploration into actionable insights that leadership could quickly understand.

Make a dashboard easier to read

Many of the lessons taught in our books are specific to making explanatory communications better by using techniques like focusing and telling a story. Since dashboard visuals update when filters are applied and data is refreshed, it is difficult to add specific text or focus attention on a particular data point to tell a compelling story. However, some of the storytelling with data lessons do apply.

Keep your audience in mind

When creating a monitoring report capable of exploratory analysis, one should be thoughtful of the audience, and the insights they need to glean from the data. To improve the overall user experience, leverage white space, alignment, and grid layouts. This will make the view easier to read and navigate at all levels of exploration. For more tips on designing effective dashboards, check out The Big Book of Dashboards. 

Choose effective visuals

To enable quick discovery, select the most appropriate chart type for the data being depicted. Some of the charts in our dashboard would be easier to interpret as a different visual. For example, a line graph would show the trends for registrations and sessions better than bars. A dot plot would enable a simpler view of trainer sessions, while stacked bars would provide a relative comparison of each fitness center location.

Identify and eliminate clutter

Because dashboards are naturally busy, we certainly want to take steps to reduce the cognitive burden for users by removing items that do not add information value, like gridlines and borders. The amount of color used can also contribute to a cluttered feeling. 

In this simplified version of the dashboard, we’ve made it easier for our audience to see the data clearly by minimizing the number of data labels, borders, and colors.

Exploring data is different than explaining data

Dashboard interactivity makes data discovery much easier, but to drive meaningful change, it is usually more effective to craft a communication specific to the story we want to tell. Creating a presentation tailored to our audience lets us deliver our findings in a way that will resonate with them, and frees us from having to compete for attention with unrelated charts, filters, and text.

Isolate data from your explorations that support your specific message

In a presentation, we don’t need to share every bit of data we looked at in dashboards throughout the exploratory process. The point of looking at all that data was so that we could isolate the critical insights, and share those directly with decision-makers. Providing too much data runs the risk of overwhelming our audience. 

A more effective approach is to include only the most meaningful information needed to support our main message, or what we like to call the Big Idea. After crafting our Big Idea, we can use it to identify what data is necessary for our story—and what we can leave behind on the dashboard.

Imagine we oversee the personal training programs across all of the fitness center locations, and after reviewing the dashboard, we realize two important things.

  1. Registrations and sessions have tapered off since launching in May. Our summer promotion was effective at getting clients to register for the program, but if we want to continue to grow the number of people we help through the program, we likely need another marketing push leading into the holiday season. 

  2. Some centers are doing a better job at getting registered clients to attend multiple sessions and there are likely some strategies we could learn from these locations. 

As a result of these findings, we want to meet with the head of marketing to discuss how to drive more awareness and engagement for the program. Our Big Idea might be: To help more clients meet their fitness goals, we should develop a new marketing strategy for our personal training program and apply learnings from successful engagement tactics across all locations.

Since we want to have a targeted conversation with the head of marketing, we do not want to share the entire dashboard, as it includes additional data that could distract from our key takeaways. Instead, we want to isolate just the pertinent information. Using our Big Idea as a filter to identify the data needed as evidence, we focus on the two graphs highlighted below.

Now that we’ve identified our audience, articulated our Big Idea, and found the data needed to support our message, we are well-positioned to create our communication to the head of marketing.

Use words and color strategically

Words and color are a powerful combination for highlighting key points in our communications. By taking the data out of the monitoring report, we can more easily get our audience to notice the most important information. Check out how we can immediately call attention to the lower number of weekly registrations by using color sparingly paired with words.

 

Explicitly communicating our findings in words and recommending an action makes the so-what clearer to see. We use the same color in our emphasized words as we do for the key points in the graph, so there is a visual link letting the viewer know how the data and the recommendation tie together. Notice how these little changes make the story unmistakable.

 

To create an effective single-slide executive summary, we can incorporate an active slide title and call out the recommended action directly, to facilitate and encourage a conversation with the head of marketing about the next steps for promoting our personal training program. 

All this insight was present in the original dashboard, but executive leaders with limited time and bandwidth can’t be expected to do all the exploration necessary to find it for themselves. Interactive tools are incredibly useful for getting to insights more quickly, but when we need to present compelling stories that drive our audience to act, a separate and more focused communication is often more effective. 

To practice transforming a dashboard into a story, check out this related community exercise. We also welcome further thoughts on dashboard stories in this related conversation. 


If you enjoyed this makeover, explore more data to story transformations on our makeovers page and our YouTube channel.