Advocacy researches just love to saturate their audiences with tables and numbers. I do get it: the more numbers, the more evidence there is and the more the chances of getting the audiences convinced. But that’s not how it always work.
You’ve invited a legislator to your forum. You did see him come and that’s a great achievement in itself. But alas! Just a few display of slides — he hurries like a pregnant woman on the way to delivery. Maybe there’s a committee hearing. Maybe there’s a payola waiting. Maybe he got bored by all the numbers!
Whatever it is, only one truth is evident. Your message has not been heard. And he may not even remember one important message from your event. Gory!
When it happens, forgive yourself and learn from your experience. Stop boring your audience with lots of senseless numbers and learn to tell the story through them. Did you notice how Al Gore used the “moving powerpoint slides” to make powerful messages in the documentary Inconvenient Truth? Just one slide and the message is complete and compelling. The way we design our pictures, graphs, tables to add seeing to reading is called information advocacy. The Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Research Desk has, among other things, good work on this aspect.
I happen to stumble on a good read on information advocacy. The book entitled, “Visualizing Information for Advocacy” provides useful samples and tips to make those powerful stories out of your data. The next time you have that opportunity to present your data to legislators, you better scan a copy through this link.
