How to Present Results to Get Results with Lea Pica

For our June 2017 event, we had a great crowd show up to learn how to present our findings to really catch and hold people’s attention. To guide us on this journey we had none other than that priestess of presentations, that vizier of visualizations, Lea Pica! In addition to our regular sponsors, we also want to give a shout out to Search Discovery for flying Lea out to Columbus.

We all know there’s a lot of bad presentations out there, perhaps we’ll even admit to giving some clunkers ourselves. So how do we get better? Lea gave us lots of practical tips on how to rethink how we present, and ultimately how to be better understood by our audiences. It’s going to require some work and learning, but why would we spend all this time and effort doing good analysis only to have our results ignored and un-acted-upon by our target audience because we presented it poorly?

Lea reminded us to put ourselves in the position of our audience, though not let our audience drive the details of what we do. If our audience asked for a report on a specific metric, what’s the question behind that request? How can we present a real insight that answers our stakeholder’s questions, not just a data dump of results.

The books Lea recommended on visualization were:

• Brain Rules by John Medina
• slide:ology by Nancy Duarte
• Presentation Zen and Presentation Zen Design by Garr Reynolds
• The WSJ Guide to Information Graphics by Dona Wong
• Effective Data Visualization by Stephanie Evergreen

So we know what we’re all reading this month! (cbusdaw bookclub anyone?)

You can find many more resources on Lea’s site here.

And, for an abridged version of her presentation, check out the video below courtesy of Mixt Media:

Please join us again next month, July 12th at Nationwide Arena with Jeff Eldersveld from the Columbus Blue Jackets!