Persuading With Data

An integrated introduction to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. Persuading with Data provides an integrated instructional guide to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. Most books on data visualization focus on creating good graphs. This is the first book that combines both explanatory visualization and communication strategy, showing how to use visuals to create effective communications that convince an audience to accept and act on the data. In four parts that proceed from micro to macro, the book explains how our brains make sense of graphs; how to design effective graphs and slides that support your ideas; how to organize those ideas into a compelling presentation; and how to deliver and defend data to an audience. Persuading with Data is for anyone who has to explain analytical results to others. It synthesizes a wide range of skills needed by modern data professionals, providing a complete toolkit for creating effective business communications. Readers will learn how to simplify in order to amplify, how to communicate data analysis, how to prepare for audience resistance, and much more. The book integrates practitioner and academic perspectives with real-world examples from a variety of industries, organizations, and disciplines. It is accessible to a wide range of readers—from undergraduates to mid-career and executive-level professionals—and has been tested in settings that include academic classes and workplace training sessions.

Dataviz—the new language of business A good visualization can communicate the nature and potential impact of information and ideas more powerfully than any other form of communication. For a long time “dataviz” was left to specialists—data scientists and professional designers. No longer. A new generation of tools and massive amounts of available data make it easy for anyone to create visualizations that communicate ideas far more effectively than generic spreadsheet charts ever could. What’s more, building good charts is quickly becoming a need-to-have skill for managers. If you’re not doing it, other managers are, and they’re getting noticed for it and getting credit for contributing to your company’s success. In Good Charts, dataviz maven Scott Berinato provides an essential guide to how visualization works and how to use this new language to impress and persuade. Dataviz today is where spreadsheets and word processors were in the early 1980s—on the cusp of changing how we work. Berinato lays out a system for thinking visually and building better charts through a process of talking, sketching, and prototyping. This book is much more than a set of static rules for making visualizations. It taps into both well-established and cutting-edge research in visual perception and neuroscience, as well as the emerging field of visualization science, to explore why good charts (and bad ones) create “feelings behind our eyes.” Along the way, Berinato also includes many engaging vignettes of dataviz pros, illustrating the ideas in practice. Good Charts will help you turn plain, uninspiring charts that merely present information into smart, effective visualizations that powerfully convey ideas.

Data is a fantastic raw resource for powering change in an organization, but all too often the people working in those organizations don't have the necessary skills to communicate with data effectively. With this practical book, subject matter experts will learn ways to develop strong, persuasive points when presenting data to different groups in their organizations. Author Carl Allchin shows anyone how to find data sources and develop data analytics, and teaches those with more data expertise how to visualize data to convey findings to key business leaders more effectively. Once both your business and data experts possess the skills to work with data and interpret its significance, you can deal with questions and challenges in departments across your organization. Learn the fundamental data skills required to work with data Use data visualization to influence change in your organization Learn how to apply data techniques to effectively work with data end to end Understand how to communicate data points clearly and persuasively Appreciate why different stakeholders often have divergent needs and views Create a playbook for using data with different departments

This text helps readers understand how to collect, manage, evaluate, and analyze data. It also provides guidelines for the presentation of analysis, especially for nonacademic audiences without training in statistical analysis. These guidelines help ensure that statistics and graphical displays tell the story that analysts want to convey while protecting their analysis from methodological criticism. Author Robert Pearson focuses attention on the conceptual understanding of statistics, while referring (sparingly) to specific formulas when they help reveal a conceptual point about the statistics. Key Features · Combines a concern for the design, collection, measurement, and the management of data with its analysis and presentation · Provides examples and data concerning real world problems in education, crime, government performance, and other policy arenas · Clearly demonstrates the steps used to generate the appropriate statistics and graphs in Excel and SPSS and then provides exercises to replicate and elaborate on these examples This book and its supporting materials are ideally suited for graduate students in professional degree programs in public policy, education, social work, criminology, urban planning, and related schools as well as advanced undergraduates in these fields. The book's explanations, descriptions, illustrations, and step-by-step exercises create the skills and knowledge required of a policy analyst, advisor, consultant or the elected or appointed public official or nonprofit officer who wants to be better able to interpret and evaluate others' applied social research. Its data sets, solutions sets, instructors' manual, lecture slides, and student workbook provide instructors with a complete and fully integrated instructional package.

This book provides a guide to becoming an empowered citizen, capable of achieving success when advocating with local government. Based on interviews with mayors, together with documentary evidence, analyses of public meetings, and the author’s own experience of advocacy, volunteering on city committees, and work on political campaigns, it describes how to advocate with local government officials, whom to contact, what to say when and where, and how to locate the facts, figures, and stories that can lend credence to an advocacy campaign. Guided by the ideas that persuasion efforts can succeed, are not difficult to undertake, and are in fact appreciated by public officials; that the system is open and that citizens have a fair chance of advancing their point of view; and that democracy depends upon citizen engagement, it presents concrete case studies in order to illustrate the guidance provided. With advice on how to organize and implement a successful advocacy campaign at a local level—and what to avoid—Persuading Local Government provides an antidote to the alienation of national politics, showing that local efforts at persuasion are meaningful and effect change on matters that affect people’s everyday lives.

Essential reading for cybersecurity professionals, security analysts, policy experts, decision-makers, activists, and law enforcement! During the Arab Spring movements, the world witnessed the power of social media to dramatically shape events. Now this timely book shows government decision-makers, security analysts, and activists how to use the social world to improve security locally, nationally, and globally--and cost-effectively. Authored by two technology/behavior/security professionals, Using Social Media for Global Security offers pages of instruction and detail on cutting-edge social media technologies, analyzing social media data, and building crowdsourcing platforms. The book teaches how to collect social media data and analyze it to map the social networks of terrorists and sex traffickers, and forecast attacks and famines. You will learn how to coalesce communities through social media to help catch murderers, coordinate disaster relief, and collect intelligence about drug smuggling from hard-to-reach areas. Also highlighting dramatic case studies drawn from the headlines, this crucial book is a must-read. Illustrates linguistic, correlative, and network analysis of OSINT Examines using crowdsourcing technologies to work and engage with populations globally to solve security problems Explores how to ethically deal with social media data without compromising people’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression Shows activists fighting against oppressive regimes how they can protect their identities online If you're responsible for maintaining local, national or global security, you'll want to read Using Social Media for Global Security.

Communicating your idea in a clear, compelling, and persuasive manner is critical when trying to launch a new venture. This Harvard Business Review collection brings together two popular books to help you craft your story, design better visualizations, impress your audience, and turn your idea into reality. Understanding and using data viz to persuade is a must-have skill for anyone in business today--especially if you're launching a new venture. In Good Charts, dataviz maven Scott Berinato provides an essential guide to how visualization works. Berinato lays out a system for thinking visually and building better charts through a process of talking, sketching, and prototyping. How do you launch the venture of your dreams? In Get Backed, entrepreneurs Evan Baehr and Evan Loomis argue that it's not just about securing startup funding. It's about building the right relationships, crafting a compelling story, and creating the perfect pitch deck. Filled with proven tips, exercises, and templates, this book shows the process for how to successfully communicate your vision. Good Charts will help you turn plain, uninspiring charts that merely present information into smart, effective visualizations that powerfully convey ideas. Get Backed will show you exactly what it takes to get funded and will give you the tools to launch a new venture. Together, these books will help you bring your idea to life.

This fascinating and practical book explores persuasive techniques in the English language, and is the ideal introduction for students and others with a professional interest in persuasion. Using a wide range of lively and accessible illustrative material, Robert Cockcroft and Susan Cockcroft unpick the complexities of persuasive language - both written and spoken - and enable readers to develop and enhance their rhetorical skills. Now thoroughly revised and expanded, the second edition of this successful text includes: - Developed application of cognitive linguistic theory, which sheds new light on the emotional and logical powers of persuasion - Extended and updated examples of rhetoric in action - Clear pointers for further study to allow readers to continue their exploration into rhetorical theory and practice - A new final chapter which invites readers to practice their skills using updated versions of traditional rhetorical exercises