Find the Data Stories Hidden in Your Reports
Overview
How to make your numbers impossible to ignore
Every year, organisations produce compliance reports (annual reports, financial statements, performance summaries) to meet their legal and accountability obligations. These reports are accurate and audited. They are also hundreds of pages long, dense with data, and written by finance professionals for finance professionals. For most of the people who need to act on what they contain, the meaning stays buried in the numbers.
In this session, Kat Greenbrook takes a real compliance report (Wellington City Council’s annual report) and shows how to find and tell the data stories hidden inside it. Working from the actual figures, she walks through her full process: finding the context a number needs before it makes sense, structuring that context into a clear narrative, and designing visuals that help tell the story. You’ll leave with a repeatable method you can apply to your own data the next time you’re asked to explain your numbers
Learning Outcomes:
In this session, attendees will learn:
- How to recognise when a report presents numbers an audience can’t interpret on their own.
- The five questions that uncover the context behind any metric.
- How to structure that context using an easy story framework.
- How to design visuals for an audience without a finance background
Suited to:
This session is recommended for finance, accounting, and reporting professionals; public-sector and council teams who produce or work with annual and compliance reports; and analysts or communicators asked to make formal reports land with a non-specialist audience.
This On Demand recording Includes:
- Recording of the Live Webinar, which can be viewed multiple times, for as long as required
- Presenters contact details for follow up questions
- CPD Quiz
- CPD Certificate
- CPD Report – Logged automatically
- PowerPoint Presentation
- Verbatim Transcript, with Searchability
- Supporting Documentation
Course syllabus
3 lessons
- Video – Find the Data Stories Hidden in Your ReportsVideo
- Feedback Survey QuestionsSurvey
- Knowledge QuizTest
Your presenter
Kat GreenbrookRogue Penguin
Director, Rogue Penguin
Kat turns data into stories people understand and act on. She has worked with data since before storytelling was recognised as part of the field, and her work runs from the analysis through to the design that communicates it. In 2016, she founded her consultancy, Rogue Penguin, and has since run hundreds of workshops for public- and private-sector teams in New Zealand and overseas.
Kat is the author of The Data Storyteller’s Handbook, read by thousands of data professionals worldwide. Her frameworks have been adopted by many organisations, including in university teaching. She is regarded as one of New Zealand’s leading data storytelling practitioners.