What is Data Storytelling? (And How Does It Impact Business Intelligence)

The next difficult step once your company has begun gathering and merging various data types is to extract value from them. Your data may have a lot of potential value, but none of it will be realized unless insights are discovered and turned into actions or business consequences. Data storytelling is one possible way to make the most of your data.

But what exactly is data storytelling, and is it really that useful for business intelligence?

Let’s take a look.

What is Data Storytelling?

Data storytelling is a means of delivering facts in an engaging narrative to a specific audience. It’s the final 10 feet of your data analysis and perhaps the most crucial.

As humans, we are evolutionarily hard-wired to communicate tales as a method of disseminating knowledge. According to some theories, storytelling was the primary means of transmitting information across vast groups of people, forming cultures as we know them today and allowing for evolutionary success through generations. With so much data now available, only data storytelling can provide a human perspective on the digital era’s increasingly complicated and constantly changing environment.

Data storytelling brings together three major areas of expertise: data science, visuals, and storytelling.

Data science is an interdisciplinary discipline of research that extracts information and insight from data and makes it available to the public. In the last two decades, this fascinating topic has significantly impacted our daily lives.

This kind of knowledge is responsible for many of the technology we take for granted, yet the narrative is not something that data scientists are inherently good at. When it comes to storytelling, data scientists are generally adept at gathering and distributing data but cannot often convey a profound grasp of the potential concealed inside the data.

Next are visualizations. The introduction of technological solutions such as dashboards became a natural answer for assisting us in comprehending our massive amounts of data. We could visualize our data like never before by transforming it into graphs, pie charts, and line charts; yet, data visualizations on their own have limits. They gave snippets of data without the context required to explain why something occurred.

The narrative is the third and, in some ways, most important component of a data tale. The narrative employs language in a structure tailored to our specific requirements, allowing us to comprehend new information fully. Visualizations and statistics are vital proof points, and a story is crucial for conveying ideas.

Why Pick Data Storytelling Over Other Technologies?

The main advantage of data storytelling is that it allows you to gain informed, actionable insight from your data. An engaging story will bring the numbers to life. It has the potential to provide an “aha!” moment of profound revelation. The story the data provides in a business environment may be adjusted to the intended audience, making it more meaningful and relevant.

The significance of the findings may be lost if a data analyst is not adept at telling a story with the data. It’s tough to motivate people to take action without a compelling tale. Data storytelling can give crucial insights, present new viewpoints, understand complex data, and motivate action.

What are the Benefits You Can Achieve?

People and businesses widely use data storytelling for several reasons. Some of those include:

• Trust is built via stories. It offers you a chance to develop trust, utilizing your data storytelling talents to build trust in pupils or clients or to entertain someone. Instead of seeing it as a dull educational opportunity, students perceive it as a fun experience. Instead of having you force your items on them selfishly, clients perceive an excellent tale as a means to connect.
• It might help you climb the search engine ranks. When determining which websites should rank first for any search, Google consistently prioritized worth over all other factors. When you build your content on the principles of data storytelling, relevant keywords will appear organically in your text without having to worry about density or structure.
• You can use data storytelling to elicit an emotional response from your audience. Your message will elicit an emotional response in the listener if you can develop relevant material that resonates with them. In most cases, we learn emotionally rather than intellectually. When we can relate to the subject matter in some manner, it is simpler to remember it. You will follow the message if you are motivated by it. Data storytelling allows you to create content that anybody with a data connection may view from anywhere on the globe.

What are the Disadvantages of Data Storytelling?

On the flip side, data storytelling can be disadvantageous to some people. Here are some of the reasons why:

• Building an audience for data storytelling takes time. People are always interested in hearing a good story. When they observe someone telling one, and there is a throng gathering around them, their curiosity will lead them to come over and listen. In the same manner, data storytelling works. Only a few individuals might pay attention the first time you tell the story. As more people see the significance of the message, they will urge others to investigate what you’re sharing. It takes time and patience, but the information retention offered by this notion can assist your message stick in the listener’s mind.
• With data storytelling, there is a cost to consider. When you tell an incredible story to a coworker or a group of kids, they use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. When you utilize data storytelling as a medium, you must include all the auditory and visual aspects that help someone else understand what you’re saying. That means you’ll have to invest time and money into creating relevant text, audio, and video resources to help readers understand your argument. Then, to stay relevant in the thoughts of people who must continue on the learning trip with you, you must continue to provide new information.

Should Data Storytelling Be Used for Business Intelligence, Reports, and Dashboards?

Ultimately, storytelling can be helpful and convenient for some use cases. However, it’s mostly just another hyped-up form of marketing with very little need in more cases. Still, data storytelling can be an already established arsenal of tech and strategies when used with other types of business intelligence software.

How DashboardFox Can Help

Today, DashboardFox focuses on the visualization area of storytelling. While other BI tools market more focus on adding narrative, DashboardFox focuses on making it easy and cost-effective to share and communicate your data to stakeholders securely.

We’re doing a pretty good job at that, but once we nail it and make it even easier for our users, we have plans to add more storytelling and narrative features.

Our customers drive our development. You can see our list of ideas (submitted by users) and our current roadmap here. Regarding storytelling, we would like to hear from you. If there is a specific feature or method of adding narrative and building unique ways to communicate data, we want to hear it. When we do actively start adding more narrative methods, they will be driven by our customers.

In the meanwhile, we’re going to keep building the most powerful business intelligence tool for business users and making it as cost-effective as possible for small to medium-sized budgets.

To get started today with a dashboard and reporting solution you can use and grow with in the future, reach out to us through a meeting or see how DashboardFox works with a free live demo session.