Here’s a tip public sector finance professionals in particular, but it could be useful to people in the private sector, too.
CIPFA includes communication and impact as one of the key competencies for public financial management professionals. That means developing skills in telling stories with financial data.
As luck would have it, late in 2022 the World Bank published A Guide to Data Storytelling in the Public Sector. The opening chapter begins with this quotation from Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google.
The ability to take data — to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualise it, to communicate it — that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.
The Guide explains the elements of a data-driven story are:
- The Data — processing and preparing data for analysis and communication
- The Narrative — to communicate insights extracted from data, its context, and recommended actions
- The Language — making the story accessible through simple and understandable language is vital when being inclusive and communicating with a diverse audience
- The Visualisation — representations of the data and narrative to communicate the key message clearly and memorably.
To save you searching for the document you can download it here.