Stephanie Evergreen: What’s Your Point? The Key to Presenting Data Effectively

Dr. Stephanie Evergreen is an internationally-recognized speaker, designer, and researcher. She is best known for bringing a research-based approach to helping researchers better communicate their work through more effective graphs, slides, and reports. She holds a PhD from Western Michigan University in interdisciplinary evaluation. Dr. Evergreen has trained researchers worldwide through keynote presentations and workshops, for clients including Time, Verizon, Head Start, American Institutes for Research, Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute, and the United Nations. She writes a popular blog on data presentation, and she has written two books: The first “Presenting Data Effectively: Communicating Your Findings for Maximum Impact” (2013), and the second “Effective Data Visualization” (2016). The biggest mistake in presenting data There are so many mistakes but the biggest is that people don’t know the points they want to make. What’s your point? The key to presenting data effectively First, think what your point is. Many people don’t start there. Finding what your point is takes a lot of work and thinking. Once you know it, the next steps are easier: making better choices in titles, colors, etc. Great tools for presenting data In terms of software tools, Stephanie sticks to MS Excel as it is ubiquitous and most of the people already know how to use it. Besides the software tools, Stephanie has compiled some of the best practices in data visualization in two tools: the Data visualization checklist and the Chart Chooser (available in her second book). Another big mistake people make is thinking that the software will solve their problems for them, just with pushing a button that will generate graphs. The software can’t do the thinking for us and will never know where the story is. Looking for inspiration? If you want to give a personal touch to your data, the