Data and narrative: a potent storytelling duo

colby-gottert-ddc
January 25, 2019
By Brock

In our blink-and-you-missed-it world, promising innovations are only as good as the stories that promote them. Every second brings another headline to the top of your social media feed or search engine results. And, more and more, every story starts to sound the same. Is there a formula for invigorating old storylines and making yours stand out? Those who attended the Innovate Carolina Network Forum on Jan. 16 engaged with a panel of local storytelling experts who shared how they draw audiences in and use data to pique interest and understanding.

Brandon Bieltz, director of web content at UNC-Chapel Hill, joined Colby Gottert and Dilsey Davis of video storytelling firm DDC International to share how their organizations deliver story-driven, data-infused content. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share key takeaways from their presentations that your organization can use to hone its storytelling strategy and tap into the powerful combination of hard facts and human emotion.

Tip: Balance your data and narrative

The story that innovators want to tell and the data-driven evidence they collect can be a powerful duo. And, as Gottert notes, finding the right balance between the two makes the difference between a story that gets noticed or nudged aside.

“Understand how it is that you are going to blend the storytelling and the data,” Gottert advised. “They are two different pathways that, when blended, become more powerful.”

Identifying effective ways to combine data and your overarching storyline can become an anecdote to story fatigue: the notion that there aren’t any new stories out there. Data can help you bring new life and substance to stories that otherwise feel tired.

“If you only tell a story, it becomes the Hollywood dilemma – everyone has seen that story,” Gottert said. “What they want to see are the data and results.”

Yet, leaning too far toward the quantitative can also become a pitfall. “If you focus too much on the data, then you lose the audience.”

A video produced by DDC that tells the story of Innovate Carolina through four different storylines and graphical presentations of data that are interspersed throughout the film.

During the forum, attendees watched an overview video about Innovate Carolina that was produced by the DDC team in fall 2018. The video’s intent is to convey the variety of ways students and faculty innovators in the Innovate Carolina network make an economic and social impact in North Carolina and beyond. The video strikes a balance between human stories and data-driven insights by adopting several techniques:

> Intertwining multiple storylines of innovators at UNC-Chapel Hill.
> Presenting graphic overlays of key data points on top of video footage.
> Interspersing the data overlays throughout the film rather than presenting them in a single instance.
>  Using graphical presentations of data to reinforce key messages immediately before or after they are spoken by interviewees or the narrator.
> Creating a map that uses motion graphics to visually illustrate the large number of interconnected innovation programs across campus.

Check out more data-driven storytelling tips from the Innovate Carolina Network Forum: Before making them think, make them feel.