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Step 3. Visualise and present your impact narrative

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You aren’t (and don’t have to be) a data visualisation specialist, but visualising the data in an effective and consistent way, and visualising your story, will help make your impact story even more impactful.

Intended Learning outcomes

This page is designed to help you:

  • Improve your visualisation skills.

  • See the creative and information potential in data visualisation.

  • Give you information about where and how you can visualise your data.

Ask yourself: what is the best way to bring my story to life for my audience? What are the best visualisation types for achieving my objectives, like securing extra funding or changing how we deliver educational programmes? Here we talk about how you present your data in an engaging and accessible way.

Why visualise your data? 

Graphs and visuals make it easier to absorb information quickly. They create ways for you to quickly and effectively advise your colleagues on what happened and what should happen next. In addition, they can easily be used in presentations and other publications when you are telling the story of your work or research. Visualising data doesn't have to be a graph or big data. Drawings, quotes and images are also impactful modes of communication.

Data visualisation can be off-putting if you haven’t done it before. But you don’t need to be an expert to present your data in a clear and accessible way. Here are some pointers and tools that we have found helpful. We share them here to help you find the confidence to explore new ways to present your data.

"How do visualisations make arguments about data?...The introduction of a visual model is the development of an interpretation of the data."

Alison Hedley, Royal Statistical Society

Ways to visualise your data

Visualisation can take a number of forms, for example, charts and graphs, maps, timelines, illustrations, infographics (visuals) and narrative infographics (including short stories and narrative). There are free tools you can use to create these, and for the more experienced or ambitious users, there are plenty of paid tools too. There are also training and capacity-building opportunities that you can benefit from, some of which are free and some of which aren’t. Review the different tools and techniques that you can use.

Ways to visualise your impact story

There are also even more novel ways to tell your story, such as transmedia storytelling. We would love to hear from you if you use transmedia storytelling to talk about your impact.

Tip.

Don’t just present data or visuals - you use it to answer your research question and narrate your impact story. Interpret that data for the reader - tell them what it shows and why it is significant.

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