Data Storytelling

Communicating Data Insights Effectively and Efficiently

The unprecedented evolution and progress of technology in the recent past decades has led to the ease of capture and surge of storage capacity for data for everyone. With the saying that ‘data is the new oil’, we have witnessed organizations undergo transformation in their business models, new companies built on data platforms and the rise of various data products that has become part and parcel of our everyday life.

In light of all these head spinning developments there is one truth that needs to be remembered: data captured and stored but not processed is wasteful and useless. All the developments mentioned above became possible because data was made sense of- that is it was turned to information upon which insights were generated which were in turn used to drive better business-decision making, improve business operations or to craft new business strategies.

This course focuses on fundamental concepts and best practices for effective communication with data- something that sits between the crosshairs of science and art. It seeks to enable you to tell the story of your data and not just merely to show data. It is primarily designed for beginners in the field of business analytics or data science who quickly wants to learn how to effectively and efficiently communicate the insights they have discovered from a data exploratory analysis and be able to significantly contribute to the improvement or transformation of their respective organization.

The course is deliberately designed to be succinct and straight forward as it seeks to develop your data storytelling skill in the quickest way possible and get you up to speed. Thus, it is unencumbered and agnostic of any visualization platform or software. Though know how of a certain platform or software will be a big help in doing some of the exercises and case study, it is unnecessary for this course. If you are not familiar with a platform or software, you can revert to the traditional way of pen and paper. This is not to say visualization platform or software are unimportant. In fact, know how on it will greatly help with completing your data story presentation and becomes more critical as you deal with increasing volumes and size of data and in finishing your story presentation in a shorter time. What is vital to begin with however is that you learn the key principles of data storytelling. Learning a certain visualization software or platform can subsequently follow because being an expert of one does not automatically make you a good data communicator or storyteller. Technology does not know the story of your data, it is your job as the communicator and analyst to bring it out contextually and show it visually. This course intends to familiarize you the process to do so.

To achieve the goals mentioned, this course is composed of several lectures, in non-technical language, laced with actual examples so that the concepts can be easily understood and grasped. It is also interspersed with case study practices and exercises. The design is as such because we believe in the learning by doing educational approach and philosophy.