When you are making a presentation one of the things you almost always include is the data that supports your point. You want your audience to know that there is science behind what you are saying; there are numbers that prove it! Data is very commonly used and is good to give your message credibility, but it is, most of the time, used wrong. Numbers on a piece of paper are intangible and although we can get the rough idea of what they represent, in the end, they don’t mean that much to us.  It just doesn’t resonate with us and after the presentation we are likely to forget it. So what good is data then? It isn’t, not in the way we conventionally present it at least. What taps into people’s brains and stays in their mind are relationships.

The best example is the “one out of ten” relationship, you’ve seen it so many times that you don’t even notice anymore; but think about it this way: What if I told you, “Nearly 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to safe water”? Wow! 1 billion, that’s a lot, right? Who knows what 1 billion people look like? You can’t really picture or grasp the gravity of the issue; instead if I say, “More than 1 out of 6 people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water”. There you have it, instantly you have a mental image of how many people don’t have safe water.

Relationships between numbers are more important than the numbers themselves. You don’t need to show the exact number of units sold by your competitors, all you want to show is a graph that shows where, in relation to them, you stand.

Consider these examples:

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

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