Don’t count on your data to tell its own story. Craft a narrative around its insights and engage in data storytelling! Plus: The risks of recording your history in obsolete formats.

Let’s say your organisation has a brilliant new study that provides a bounty of insight about your area of expertise. So you prep a press release, line up some internal experts who are ready to field some interviews, and think that the ensuing press campaign would be a roaring success.

“But as someone who has worked the beat as a reporter and sat in an editor’s chair, I can say that most nonprofits (and businesses, too) have a difficult time pitching stories about their data and research,” Panepento Strategies principal Peter Panepento writes. “And as someone who has done a lot of storytelling with data, I can see why.”

In a guest post on Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog, Panepento makes the case for finding the narrative within the data you’ve collected and then pitching that to the media, instead of just overwhelming them with statistics.

“It all starts with asking the right questions. In the same way a reporter interviews a source or a detective interviews a witness, you need to interview your data—asking questions that will help draw the conclusions you need to go forward,” he writes.

For some specific examples of how organizations have succeeded by tying their data to a narrative, read Panepento’s full post here.

Sourced from Associations Now here.