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Present Your Statistics In Context For More Impact
By Helen Wilkie, Sat Dec 10th
“I didn’t have 3000 pairs of shoes. I had only 1600pairs.”—Imelda Marcos Everything’s relative. A million dollars sounds like a lot ofmoney to someone who makes an average salary, but it’s a drop inthe bucket to a Warren Buffett or a Bill Gates. Running ahundred metres in a few seconds seems like a miracle to ordinarymortals, but a track and field athlete will work hard to shaveeven more off that time. Yet presenters often quote statistics without benchmarks, so theaudience doesn’t know how to evaluate them. Is $10,000 a lot ofmoney? Well it is for a bicycle. It’s not much for a house,unless that house is in a small village in a third worldcountry, where it might be exorbitant. If you quote numbers thisway, you will lose the audience while they try to decide whether$125,000 is good, bad or indifferent in this context. Yourstatistics lose their power.
In a presentation skills workshop for a group of lawyers, oneparticipant was practicing his delivery of an address to thejury in an upcoming trial. He was asking for damages in theamount of $750,000, and hoped the jury would consider itreasonable. It’s quite a large sum, and most ordinary folksthink of that kind of cash as a lottery win. He needed to put itin context for them. He might, for example, ask the jury to suppose they werethirty-five years old and earning a salary of $40,000 a year. Bythe time they reached the age of sixty-five, allowing forreasonable increases, they could expect to have earned a certainamount. (He would do the arithmetic and insert the actual sum.)That amount would be what is called their “expected lifetimeincome”.
However, if they were involved in an accident andsuddenly unable to work any more, that amount now representstheir “forfeited lifetime income”. That is what happened to thisclaimant, and the amount he would have lost was $750,000. So infact, counsel was asking no more than the amount the man wouldhave earned, had he not met with this unfortunate accident. Don’t you think the jury is more likely to agree when given thisbackground explanation? Here are three ways to put figures in context for your audience. 1. Compare them to something to which they can personallyrelate, as in the courtroom example. 2. Compare them to a similar situation. If a new manufacturingprocess takes fifteen minutes, mention that the old one took twohours, so we save 1-3/4 hours. For even more effect, tell themhow much time this will save in an average shift or on a certainnumber of product units. Go further and translate that time intomoney and the statistic will now be a strong argument for change. 3. Create vivid word pictures to illustrate size: That’s theequivalent of five football fields. That’s enough to fill tenOlympic-size swimming pools. If laid end-to-end they wouldstretch from New York to L.A. and back again. Statistics can be great persuaders, but only when the audiencehas the means to evaluate them. About the author:Helen Wilkie is a professional keynote speaker, workshopfacilitator and author whose latest book is "The Hidden ProfitCenter—a tale of profits lost and found through communication."For more on presentation, visithttp://www.mhwcom.com/pages/messrecundbook.html While you're onthe site, sign up for Communi-keys and receive monthlycommunication techniques directly from Helen.
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