Dr. Jennifer Aaker, marketing expert and professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, once shared a story of a marketing researcher who asked students to each give a persuasive one-minute pitch to their classmates. While most students included statistics in their pitches (an average of 2.5 stats), only one student included a story in their pitch. Afterwards, the researcher asked the students to write down every idea they remembered from each pitch.
While five percent of the students remembered a statistic, 63 percent remembered the story.
The reason? Aaker offers three:
- Stories are powerful tools that force people to slow down and listen.
- Stories influence how people see you.
- Stories move people from complacency to action.
Statistics may bring attention to a cause, but stories elevate their impact. In short, stories can give numbers more credibility.
Some people are hard numbers folks, and I get it. Especially if you’re someone that’s responsible for illustrating impact, such as a grant writer, funder, nonprofit manager. Social workers and others in the helping professional rely on hard numbers because it can lead to increases in funder for their programs and services.
It’s easier to pull numbers. Just create a survey and send it out.
But if the marketing researcher’s discovery is any indication, stories draw people in and have greater impact.
Take the “identifiable victim effect”, for instance. This refers to the human tendency to offer greater sympathy and aid when a specific person is observed under hardship, compared to a vaguely defined group with the same need. The identifiable victim effects puts a “face” to a problem, causing greater impact.
For example, last night, CNN aired a town hall featuring survivors of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people (including 14 students) were killed. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that, on average, 96 people die by gun violence every day in the United States. An average of 96 people doesn’t sound like a lot, but hearing the voices of the survivors and family members during the town hall (and seeing the faces of the victims from the shooting) literally puts a face on the problem of gun violence in America more now than it ever has.
As a follow-up to my “Who Are The People Behind the Numbers?” blog post from 2014, I wrote a Try This exercise on using storytelling as a tool for Reproductive Justice. Sharing personal stories resonate with us and helps to build powerful connections with others while also helping to build compassion, especially when we’ve never had a particular experience.
Sometimes seeing a high percentage raises awareness; but numbers alone may not fully capture the entire picture. And there are even people who say that storytelling should replace numbers. Don’t throw out your spreadsheets and statistical software just yet, but don’t stress yourself out with figuring out how to tell the most compelling story without numbers to back it up. Instead, use storytelling to make your numbers stand out (and vice versa). Here are 5 ways to weave storytelling with statistics.
But first, a brief experience with storytelling
Post-college, I joined a young women’s leadership council with the Pro-Choice Public Education Project (PEP) around 2006, 2 years after the release of PEP’s research “She Speaks: African American and Latino Young Women on Reproductive Health and Rights”. She Speaks was a qualitative (narrative-driven) study that elevated the concerns of young Black and Latina women and centered their aspirations related to reproductive freedom.
At the time, PEP (an organization no longer in existence) was at the beginning stages of using the research from She Speaks to create the Recognize campaign. The tagline, “Recognize your strength. Recognize your power. Recognize your potential. Take care of yourself” centered the complex realities that many young women of color face , including HIV/AIDS, lack of health insurance, self-determination and bodily autonomy, and the desire to start families someday.
The image that most resonated with me from the Recognize campaign was the “Mind. Body. Soul. Make Sure It’s All Good”, shown below.
The image, created by artist Maria “TOOFLY” Castillo, illustrated a key point outlined in She Speaks: “While white women have had to demand freedom from compulsory motherhood, women of color have had to fight for the right to bear children and raise them out of poverty.” (pg. 4). Also, across the board, Black and Latina young women linked the importance of their reproductive health to pregnancy, childbirth and having a healthy pregnancy in the future as opposed to concern about their reproductive health before pregnancy. (pg.20).
Higher incidences of miscarriages and maternal and infant mortality rates for Black mothers in the United States have been getting more attention in recent years. Systemic racism and lack of adequate prenatal care are just two reasons for this. But as mentioned for “Mind. Body. Soul” and in last week’s blog post, raising awareness of what’s going well is just as important is highlighting the concerns and possible solutions.
Weaving statistics with storytelling
Dr. Aaker says,
When data and stories are used together, they resonate the audience both intellectually and emotionally. For a lasting effect, you need to persuade the rational brain, but also resonate with the emotional brain.
So, how can we create a positive flow between statistics and storytelling? Here are a few ways:
Understand that each one serves an intended purpose: As I mentioned, some people prefer hard numbers. Numbers can seem more factual and unbiased, but as I’ve also mentioned, numbers alone may not tell the full story. While stories are compelling, never should the story make something sound so outlandish that you can’t even find the data to back it up. This is why I’ve always been a proponent of mixed methods research, combining quantitative approaches with qualitative approaches. You can create a survey that includes open-ended questions to encourage respondents to give context to the multiple choice questions they’ve answered. Another example is conducting a focus group using synthesized data from an administered survey, asking the participants to share additional insights to the statistics.
Recognize that one is more logical, while the other is emotional: They are both designed to do the same thing: Create impact. Combining storytelling with statistics satisfies the logical side of our brain as well as the emotional side. Again some people are more drawn to numbers compared to stories and vice versa, but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other.
Lead with one, and have the other back it up: If using a story to draw your audience in first, use the appropriate statistics for added context. If starting off with statistics, make sure they set the stage for the story by laying the foundation. A great example of leading and backing up is Bedsider’s birth control methods page. Bedsider, a free birth control support network, shares statistics of every form of birth control methods, and accompanies the facts with stories. Here’s an example of how Bedsider used statistics and stories for emergency contraception. See how Bedsider explains the purpose and use of EC, the types of EC currently available, accompanied by videos sharing the female and male perspective of using EC.
Make your data look visually appealing: Data visualization, the presentation of data in a pictorial or graphical format, is growing in popularity. Using data viz helps people understand the significance of data by placing it into a visual context. Bar graphs are the most basic example of this, but you can highlight important numbers in other ways. For example, here are the before and after slide visuals created by Dr. Stephanie Evergreen to illustrate American Evaluation Association’s 2013 president Jody Fitzpatrick’s AEA Evaluation 2013 presidential keynote presentation.
Seek out examples of how storytelling is being used for impact: How often do you make a decision based on statistics? And how many of those decisions are based on a story you’ve heard? A prime example of this are testimonials. When looking to purchase a product or service, you’re more likely to be persuaded by written customer and client reviews compared to statistics and claims the manufacturer shares. And it’s more powerful when you see a face attached to the name of the reviewer.
Key takeaway
Using storytelling with statistics helps to drive your message home. You don’t have to sacrifice one over the other, as long as you can find ways to make them flow together.
