Create meaningful impact With Your Data
Supplying the right audience with the right amount of data in the right format increases the likelihood that a target audience will pay attention.
Let’s start with a story
1854, Crimean peninsula
British and French soldiers were engaged with Russia in a battle over religion and territory. Soldiers were dying in droves.
A Young British Nurse
volunteered to serve in the military hospitals in Turkey, where injured soldiers were transported for care. When she arrived, the sanitary conditions in the hospitals were horrendous — as were the manner in which the hospitals were collecting data about their patients.
Florence Nightingale
the young nurse from the story, did something truly remarkable — she partnered with the accomplished statistician William Farr to analyze the hospital mortality data.
“To understand God's thoughts, we must study statistics for these are the measure of His purpose.” Florence Nightingale
“You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the driest of all reading,” William Farr
Nightingale created polar area diagrams
often referred to as Nightingale’s “Rose” or “Coxcombs” – which used colored wedges to represent causes of death in the army during each month of the war.
Communicating Data For Impact
To maximize impact, we must first identify the audiences we want to address, understand their needs and level of sophistication around data, and then provide them with the appropriate presentation of data.
Data Consumer
Interested individuals consume the data. If the data trigger action, these individuals may move into a more active role. They typically have little data and domain expertise.
Data Actor
Data actors act on and leverage the data to drive change. They have significant clout, staff and domain knowledge, but often only limited time.
Data Promoter
Data promoters leverage data to create additional value. They inform, educate or build businesses around data. Since they are multiplying the audience for a given (set of) datasets, they can play a key role in influencing Data Actors, Data Consumers or both and creating impact with the data.
Data Analyst
Analysts use data to create deeper understanding, while informing data actors and consumers. They have a deep domain knowledge, extensive data knowledge, and will review and condense large amounts of data for a given topic.
Data Researcher
Researchers work in the trenches to collect, analyze, and synthesize data for the groups above; they often perform data collection and analysis themselves.
Global Burden of Disease
The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) is a study that measures the impact of diseases, injuries, and risk factors that shorten lives or create health loss through short- or long-term disabilities. GBD 2010 covers 187 countries, provides data for 291 diseases and injuries, and looks at 67 risk factors. 3 different metrics with a results dataset of more than 1 billion data points.
See how GBD displays the data in the right format for the right audiences.