Data Visualisation and Storytelling for Government
7 and 14 March 2023 | 10:00 AM – 2:30 PM AEDT | Online
Training Overview
Framing your Data into an Engaging Narrative
All levels of government collect an increasing amount of data every day, with this data becoming a critical asset for insight-led decision making.
However, it can be difficult to organise, manage and extract actionable insights from these large, diverse data sets, let alone effectively lead a data team to responsibly and accurately inform larger organisational or political decisions.
Emerging as a tool to overcome this challenge is data visualisation. Naturally the human brain is pre-programmed to respond faster to visual cues, and with the rise of big data in recent years, the importance of data visualisation, coupled with the art of data storytelling — has grown exponentially.
This training provides you with all the tools and techniques to apply the best practice data visualisation principles to shape data stories. Participants leave with theoretical and practical knowledge, as well as a functional process that can be immediately applied to any dataset to take data from mere information, and transform it into actionable insights.
Who Should Attend
This course is designed for heads, directors, assistant directors, managers, team leaders, officers, and analysts charged with driving transformation change in all three levels of government including:
Data Analysis
Business Analysis
Business Intelligence
Learning Outcomes
Uncovering the insights
Using data visualisations technique to unlock trends and patterns
Getting buy-in from business leaders
Building a
compelling narrative using your data
Optimising your data
Driving transformation and affecting
change
Building engagement
Identifying and presenting the data that they care about with multi-disciplinary teams
Meet Your Facilitator
Lisa Cornish
Data Journalist, Data Scientist,
Data Strategist, Data Visualisation
and Data Communication Expert
Lisa Cornish is a data journalist, scientist, analyst, communication, visualisation expert, and geospatial analyst with expertise in big data and open data. She develops end-to-end solutions including strategies
for data publication and development of interactive visualisations, including Tableau, Qlik, R, and Power BI, to improve the use of corporate and open data.
Lisa works with clients to improve communications strategies, highlighting the value of data journalism and interactives to enable end-users to better understand issues, policies, and decisions being communicated, and aims to build capability within organisations to achieve these goals through training and knowledge sharing. As a journalist, her work has been featured in Devex, News Corp Australia, The Mandarin, and SmartCompany.
Lisa has partnered with a range of organisations to deliver interactive communication strategies, including the World Intellectual Property Organization; Austrade; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’ Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet; Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority; IP Australia; The Treasury; Workplace Gender Equality Agency; and ANZ Bank.
Key Sessions
Data Visualisation Fundamentals
- An Introduction to Data Visualisation and Data Storytelling
- What makes a striking visualisation
- The role of visualisation in analytics
- The tenets of visualisation – finding data, designing a story, making your visualisation, and refining your work
- The Grammar of Graphics
- The vocabulary and grammar of visualisation
- Using layout, hierarchy, color, shape, line, and typeface
- Exploring visualisation techniques to tell the right stories
- Breakout Activity: Assess Data Visualisations Against Best Practice Guidelines
- Using guidelines and frameworks provided to now assess your data projects prepared before the workshop, and example visualisations
- Discuss and share learnings and feedback with group
- The good, bad, and ugly
Data Visualisation Fundamentals
- Visualising Your Data
- Exploratory vs. explanatory visualisations
- Understanding chart types and selection techniques
- Drawing the basic data plot types (bar chart, donut chart, histogram, density plot, scatterplot, boxplot)
- Text and other graphics
- Avoiding bad visual selections
- Building Compelling Data Narratives
- Making data attainable, digestible, and functional through visualisation
- Gleaning valuable insights from data sets
- Building compelling narratives to engage stakeholders
- Avoiding the traps of dashboards
- Breakout Activity: Presenting your Data
- How would you present this data?
- Select the best way to visualise data presented, with the option of designing your selected option
- Devising a plan to present the given data
Application & Evaluation
- Group Project: Project Brief
- Breakout into groups for a hands-on learning experience
- Harness the theoretical and practical knowledge gained and apply it to real data visualisations and data sets
- Work on realistic data sets and unique projects
- Group Project: Assess visualisations and tell your story
- Assess the good and bad of a real data visualisations
- Recommend changes, and using the raw data suggest and draft ways to improve the visualisations
- Identify a story in the data to present to stakeholders, securing buy-in for your project
Application & Evaluation
- Group Project: Pitch and Share
- Present your mini-project with the group
- Harness the design, storytelling, and application techniques learned to deliver a compelling data narrative
- Benchmark against your peers
- Group Project: Evaluation and Feedback
- Peer-review fellow participants’ projects
- Receive professional feedback and constructive criticism from the training facilitator
- Discuss visualisation and narrative-building best practices and top tips