Research shows … that nearly half of commuters text and drive … that one in three patients enters the hospital malnourished … and that 66% of women won’t kiss men with moustaches.

Startling statistics can make a good lead.

Let’s pause and ponder that for a minute too.

Underline “startling.” This doesn’t mean that you can pack your first paragraph with a bunch of boring numbers. But one surprising statistic can set up your PR piece beautifully.

But you don’t have to tell PRSA’s Silver Anvil Award winners. They use statistics to sell their ideas:

From the sad …

AT&T uses startling stats in its release “Nearly Half of Commuters Admit to Texting While Driving”:

And Visa, in this Reading Is Fundamental lead:

… to the sick …

Alliance to Advance Patient Nutrition leads with the numbers in its release “Leading Healthcare Organizations Launch Interdisciplinary Partnership: The Alliance to Advance Patient Nutrition”:

So does Novartis Animal Health, in this Deramaxx lead:

… to the sublime …

Cisco starts with compelling numbers in its blog post “The Internet of Everything is the New Economy”:

… to the ridiculous.

Gillette uses startling stats in its media alert “Gillette asks Houston couples to ‘Kiss & Tell’ in live national experiment and tell the world their preference — a smooth shaven or stubbled kiss”:

Next steps

Learn to add startling statistics to your next PR lead.

The post Add statistics to your press release lead appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

“Great clots of numbers dropped into a story with a steam shovel create a wall of abstraction.”

— William Blundell, author, The Art and Craft of Feature Writing

Don’t create a wall of abstraction. Reduce statistical clutter, increase readability and make numbers more understandable. Here’s how:

1. Use good numbers.

Get the number right, and get the right numbers.

Some 72% of companies have at least one graphical distortion in their annual reports, says Jimmy Locklear, executive vice president, Phelan Annual Reports Inc.

Make sure yours is among the other 28%.

“Your presentation will stand or fall on the quality, relevance and integrity of your content,” writes Edward Tufte, “the da Vinci of data.”

“If your numbers are boring, it’s too late. If your images aren’t relevant, putting them in four-color won’t help. Design can never rescue failed content. The best design can do is not screw up good content.”

2. Make your point.

“Few members of our audience turn to The Oregonian because they’re craving a good story problem.”

— Jack Hart, managing editor, The Oregonian

What’s the bottom line in this paragraph?

Who knows? The writer reported the data, but didn’t explain what the data meant.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

— Albert Einstein, genius

I know, I know, you dug up all these numbers, and now you want to use them. But just because you know the data doesn’t mean your readers must, too. If you focus on what you want your readers to take away from the data, you may find that you can make your point with far fewer numbers.

Ask, “Which of these numbers really explains the story to our readers?” Then dump the rest.

3. Use no more than three numbers per paragraph.

“Numbers bog down the text. Loading a story up with numbers almost guarantees low readership.”

— Jack Hart, managing editor, The Oregonian

Paragraphs packed with numbers just make your readers’ eyes glaze over. They look hard to read, so your audience members may decide to tune out before they even attempt the text. This paragraph, for instance, has six numbers:

Limit yourself to two or three numbers per paragraph. Count toward your total:

• Dates
• Times
• Spelled-out numbers like “two”

4. Communicate numbers visually.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a graph is worth a million numbers.

To cut clutter, take some of your numbers out of the paragraph and place them into a simple table:

5. Choose the right kind of chart.

Bars, pies or lines? The right chart depends on the information you’re conveying. Use a:

• Bar chart to show how each piece relates to the others
• Pie chart to show how each piece relates to the other and to the whole
• Vertical bar chart to fix several things in one moment in time
• Line chart to show trends
• Table to compare two or more items by two or more characteristics

Choose bars and pies. Bar graphs and pie charts are both more effective than line charts at helping readers understand statistical data.

6. Communicate with charts.

Make sure your chart says what you mean.

• Cut your pie into big pieces. Pie charts start getting confusing when you have more than five “slices,” Locklear says. “Slices become too thin, and it becomes difficult to differentiate and compare values.”
• Position time values from left to right. Some charts start with the most recent year to highlight it. But because Westerners read from left to right, that can confuse readers. Instead, place the earliest year at the left, Locklear advises, the most recent year at the right.
• Keep it simple. A chart should make one point clearly. You say you have more than one idea? Then you need more than one chart.
• Keep it clear. In a table with more than five rows of columns, use screens to delineate each row.

7. Present your chart.

Transform your chart into a free-standing data package.

Write a headline. A real one, with a hook. Not just a label.

Write a caption. People are more likely to read it than the text of your article. What do you want them to take away from this chart?

Rising interest rates make homes less affordable

It adds up: A small increase in interest rates can make a big difference in your monthly budget.

8. Spread your stats around.

“Numbers bog down the text. Loading a story up with numbers almost guarantees low readership.”

— Jack Hart, managing editor, The Oregonian

Pace yourself. Limit yourself to two paragraphs containing numbers in a row. You don’t need to cram all the facts and figures into one section of the story.

9. Round numbers off.

Unless your readers are statisticians, it’s rare that they’ll need six decimals of precision (or even one!) in the numbers you report.

• Avoid: 64.36752%
• Better: 64%
• Even better: Almost two-thirds
• Best: Two out of three

10. Use words.

Substitute words for numbers whenever you can:

• “One in five” gives a better picture than “20%.”
• “Nearly doubled” means more than “a 97%increase.”
• “Two-thirds” is clearer than “67%.”

11. Do use precision to make a point.

If your point is fragility, go ahead and use the precise number. That’s what the late-great Kansas City Star columnist C.W. Gusewelle did to help readers understand how delicate and vulnerable monarch butterflies are as they migrate south for the winter:

Consulting the literature, I find that the average weight of an adult monarch may be expressed as 0.0176 of an ounce, about the same as a good-sized snowflake.

The same thing is true if your point is specificity. Some of my clients in the telecom industry use “five nines” — or 99.999%— to express the accuracy of their equipment.

“Nearly 100%,” obviously, doesn’t say the same thing.

Learn more about writing statistics.

• What’s the latest U.S. numeracy rate? Here’s why your readers struggle to understand your numbers.
• How to write statistics right: The fanciest chart can’t overcome a bad data set or standard deviation.
• What’s the effect of statistics in persuasive writing? Reframe the data to improve decision-making.

The post Don’t do a data dump when writing statistics appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

People in one study rated a disease that kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000 as more dangerous than one that kills 24.14% of the population (Yamagishi, 1997). But in fact, it’s about half as dangerous.

Why? The way you present, or frame, the information changes the way people — even experts — perceive it.

“If you tell someone that something will happen to one out of 10 people, they think, ‘Well, who’s the one?’” Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychologist, told Money.

Trying to help readers make a complex decision? Reframe the data so people can more easily see its meaning. Here’s how:

1. Choose frequencies, not probabilities.

People process frequencies (2 out of 100) better than percentages (2%) (Kaplan, 1986). Frequencies are effective because they:

• Demonstrate the importance of data. People weigh frequencies as more important than percentages when making decisions (Lipkus, Samsa and Rimer, 2001).
• Help people make better choices. In one study, faculty members and students at the Harvard Medical School made much better decisions when they received information about diseases and symptoms in the form of frequencies instead of probabilities (Huffrage, Lindsey, Hertwig and Gigerenzer, 2000).
• Help even experts see the situation more clearly. Forensic psychiatrists and psychologists judged a patient’s risk of being violent as much greater when it was communicated as a frequency instead of a probability (Slivic, Monahan and MacGregor, 2000).

2. Frame as a loss (or gain).

Give readers new ways to think about information by highlighting the potential gain or loss. You can frame your data as:

• Mortality vs. survival rates. The effect of dying seems to be greater when it is framed as a mortality rate of 10% than when it is framed as a survival rate of 90%. And both patients and doctors found surgery less attractive than radiation therapy when risk information was presented in terms of mortality rather than survival, despite surgery having better long-term prospects (McNeil, Pauker and Sox, 1986).
• Risk vs. reward. Consumers understood information much better, valued it more and gave it more weight in decision-making when it was framed as a loss or risk than as a reward. So “protect yourself from problems in health plans” is more effective than “get the best quality” (Hibbard, Harris-Kojetin, Mullen, Lubalin and Garfinkel, 2000).
• Loss vs. gain. In six out of seven studies, framing information as a loss was more effective than as a gain in communicating prevention, detection and treatment (Edwards, Elwyn, Covey, Matthews and Pill, 2001).
• Consider the message within the frame. Framing your message as a loss is more effective when promoting screening. Framing it as a gain is more effective when promoting prevention (Rothman, Martino, Bedell, Detweiler and Salovey, 1999).

3. Generalize a little.

In order to be as “correct” as possible, communicators often include too much information — six decimal points of precision, for instance, or data about confidence intervals.

But that actually makes important details harder to suss out. As a result, people weigh this information lower when making a decision (Hsee, 1996). So, for instance, offer an average point estimate (a score of 8) instead of a more correct one (7 to 9).

But don’t pile on the data.

To help people make better decisions, reframe the data — don’t just offer more data.
___

Source: Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peters, “Supporting Informed Consumer Health Care Decisions: Data Presentation Approaches that Facilitate the Use of Information in Choice,” Annual Review of Public Health, 2003, Vol. 24, pp. 413-33

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When I wrote an annual report about charitable giving in Kansas City, I wanted to compare the $770 million Kansas Citians gave to charitable organizations in one year to make that number more meaningful to the audience.

To track down the comparisons, I:

1. Used the Business Journal’s Book of Lists to report that $770 million was “more than the annual revenues of Blue Cross/Blue Shield” and “more than the combined annual budgets of the metropolitan area’s three largest school districts.”
2. Checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find the city’s average wage. After a few minutes with my calculator, I was able to report: “To achieve that amount, some 24,000 people would have to work full time for a year at Kansas City’s average hourly wage of $15.59.”
3. Did the math. From the Book of Lists, I learned the size of the student body of one of the city’s largest school districts. I divided $770 million by the number of students. The result: in the neighborhood of $35,000 per student.
4. Asked: “What would that buy that students might want?” (That helps you sync your metaphors with your topic.) My answer: some kind of car. That year, Jeeps were popular, so I …
5. Googled “how much is a jeep” to find out what kind of Jeep I could get for $35,000.

As a result, I was able to report that:

The $770 million Kansas Citians give to charity each year is more than enough to buy every student in the Kansas City, Kan., School District a brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee.

I know, I know. When you think about statistics, you hear:

Blah blah blah data set blah blah blaw standard deviation blah blah blah data analysis blah blah blah summary statistics blah blah blah distribution of your data blah blah blah measure of variability blah blah blah raw data blah blah blah inferential statistics blah blah blah measures of central tendency.

Me too. But anyone who’s mastered seventh-grade math can add some statistical evidence to most stories. All it takes is some extra time with your BFF and research assistant Google, the calculator on your phone and a few minutes to figure out how to figure it out.

That’s important. As Chip Scanlan of the Poynter Institute says:

“Every time you feel your fingers reach for the top row of the keyboard, ask, ‘What’s it like?’”

Resources for writing descriptive statistics

Need a starting point for your statistical analogies? Check out these resources:

• Aneki.com. Rankings and statistics on hundreds of topics, from America’s leading causes of death to the world’s best airports.
• Business Journal’s Book of Lists. Find annual revenues of top local companies and more.
• CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics FastStats. Find out how many people visited an emergency room or died at work in 2019.
• City-Data. Get everything from satellite photos to resident stats on U.S. cities and states.
• Finding Data on the Internet. Journalist Robert Niles’ list of helpful links to “reputable data on everything from public safety to campaign contributions”
• Google. You can’t beat it for finding, say, a list of the top-paid U.S. CEOs, the budget of Uganda or things that are worth $770 million
• Google’s Dataset Search. “If you’re looking for data, your search should start here.” — The Poynter Institute
• The Polling Report. Find out how many people think what.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Dig up average hourly wages and more.
• U.S. Census Bureau. For those times when you just need to know that the world population is 7,742,206,702

Get additional information about writing with statistics.

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The BBC covers the most serious news known to man — West Bank stabbings, friendly fire air strikes, Justin Bieber’s bad behavior — and does so in an average of 4.7-character words.

How does your copy’s readability compare to that of the world’s largest broadcast organization?

Benchmark readability

One way to find out is to benchmark readability statistics. That’s a great way to convince bosses, clients and reviewers that extremely readable copy makes sense, even for serious messages.

We used Microsoft Word’s Readability Statistics to measure how the BBC’s readability stacks up. We analyzed every story (23, including the top 10 most read) on the BBC.com home page on a single day.

Here’s what we found out … and how you can improve readability of your own pieces.

1. The BBC’s paragraphs weigh in at an average of just 24 words, or 1.4 sentences. See how easy this 21-word paragraph looks — and is — to process:

2. The BBC’s lead paragraphs average 25 words. Write first paragraphs that go down easy like this 21-word lead from the BBC:

3. The BBC’s sentences average 19 words — a little longer than our recommended average. Model the sentences from this piece, which averaged 13.7 words per sentence:

4. The BBC averages 4.7 characters per word. This passage, for instance, weighs in at about 4.8 characters per word:

5. Of the 23 BBC articles we reviewed, only one had any passive voice. That gives the BBC an average .4% (that’s four-tenths of 1%) passive voice total. This passage, for instance, is free from passive voice:

6. The BBC averages 52.4 on this readability scale of 0 to 100. This passage hits 64.5 on the Flesch scale:

7. The world news organization weighs in at 10.63. C’mon. You can do better. This passage, for instance, hits 6.4 on the Flesch-Kincaid scale:

Benchmark readability

Benchmarking your copy’s readability can help you:

• Convince approvers that — yes, even in your business — high readability is essential and achievable.
• Set, measure and report standards for readable writing within your writing group.
• Improve readability for your own copy.

What are you waiting for? Benchmark readability in business media, industry journals, your company communications — maybe even your competitors’.

Then, no matter how serious the material, aim for standards that will help you get the word out to the most people.

Just like the BBC does.

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How small is small? One-third the size of a ladybug? The size of a sprinkle on an ice cream cone?

Analogy, metaphor, simile and other comparisons can help your readers “see” the size and scale you’re communicating.

Here’s how:

1. Help readers see.

A J-school friend of mine, The Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Helliker, used that approach in his Pulitzer Prize-winning explanatory series on aneurysms:

OK, now I see it.

2. Ask, “What’s it like?”

In A Perfect Red, Amy Butler Greenfield describes her topic, cochineal, thus:

When you use adjectives like “voracious” and “quite small,” make sure your reader can see what that looks like. How voracious is “voracious”? “Quite small” says one thing; “one-third the size of a ladybug” says something entirely different.

3. Ask, “How big is big?”

In the movie “Armageddon,” the president’s staff is briefing the leader of the free world about the giant asteroid that’s hurling toward earth.

Just how big is it? the president asks.

260,000 square miles and change, the team answers.

Finally, Billy Bob Thornton’s character steps in: “It’s the size of Texas, Mr. President,” he says.

Which means more: “261,797 square miles”? Or “the size of Texas”?

Turn numbers into things for easier understanding.

4. Add a zero.

What’s the difference between 10 and 10 billion?

Modern designers Charles and Ray Eames answered that question by zooming from a picnicker in a Chicago park out to the galaxies above him and back into the microscopic world inside his hand.

It’s an object lesson in communicating scale through analogy. And you can see it firsthand in Powers of Ten — the flipbook, the movie or the book.

5. Ask, “How small is small?”

When the late, great Kansas City Star columnist C.W. Gusewelle wanted to help readers understand the fragility of monarch butterflies as they migrate south for the winter, he wrote:

I don’t know whether I appreciate the analogy more or the four decimal points of precision!

Both make the point: It’s not enough just to communicate the numbers. You also need to help readers see them.

6. Put it in their pocket.

In Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston’s amazing book about smallpox, the author uses comparison to help readers see size and scale, too:

How small is small? The size of jimmy on an ice-cream cone.

Need to convey size and scale? Show your reader how small or large your number is through comparison.

____

Source: Kevin Helliker and Thomas M. Burton, “The Battle of the Bulge: Aneurysm Tests Could Save A Lot of Lives, if Performed,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13, 2003

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When 6,000 power poles went down in New Orleans during a series of ice storms, Entergy Senior Communications Specialist David Lewis needed a way to make that number tangible in an executive speech.

So he bought 6,000 wooden kitchen matchsticks and put them in a clear plastic container. Then he had the speaker display the matches when making his point about the broken poles.

One thing I really like about Lewis’ approach is that he synced his analogy with his subject.

The best metaphors “match” the topic. Matches conceptually go with power outages, and matchsticks are the shape of power poles.

Need to illustrate a big number? Find a way to help audience members visualize it. Big numbers don’t mean anything without a comparison.

How high is high?

When Kevin Helliker and Thomas Burton wrote their Pulitzer Prize-winning series about aneurysms in the aortic artery for The Wall Street Journal, they needed to explain how weightlifting affected blood pressure. They wrote:

The power of zero

When Tim Rush, a PR pro at Snapp Norris Group, needed to explain a big number, he asked his subject matter expert to illustrate the difference between a million and a billion.

One million seconds is about 12 days, Rush was able to report. One billion seconds is about 32 years.

Illustrate the difference some zeros make.

How many steps in a Krispy Kreme?

“Food Court” — Men’s Health’s data bit on caloric crimes — recently featured this item:

Yikes!

Two techniques to steal from this passage:

1. Compare big numbers(1,140 calories) to something else (marching up a temple’s steps 15 times) to help readers understand them.
2. Bring consequences homeby putting the reader in the scenario and writing directly to “you.”

And please … don’t pass the Krispy Kremes.

Give numbers context.

“Numbers without context, especially large ones with many zeros trailing behind, are about as intelligible as vowels without consonants,” writes Daniel Okrent, former New York Times ombudsman.

Don’t make your message so hard. Give readers context along with their statistics. Turn numbers into things. Ask, “What’s it like?”

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Which personal finance story would draw you in? One that starts:

Or one with this lead, from Northern Update, the marketing magazine of Northern Funds:

The latter? Me, too.

Name names and number numbers. Draw attention to your message and prove your points with numerical detail.

1. How big is big?

Show readers size and scale with statistics and comparison.

Here’s a before example, the lead of a content marketing piece a client sent me to edit:

There’s a number in there, but it’s not used to build the story, set the scene or make a point. Here’s the after, this time with more statistical evidence to make a point about the client’s project:

2. How small is small?

So how small is small? Is it the size of a thumbnail? An iPhone? A toaster? A backpack? A car?

Help readers see size and scale with comparison.

In this before, the client had included a laptop analogy, but buried it further in the story:

But if the whole point is size, lead with that. Here’s my rewrite:

How wet is wet?

If your point is “prone to flooding,” then make that point statistically. Here’s another before, from that same client:

OK, my basement is prone to flooding, too. But how wet is wet? Here’s my rewrite, supplemented with 6 minutes of online research:

Add concrete detail with statistics.

Startling statistics are amongst more than 6 types of concrete material to try.

“If you want to be credible, be specific,” writes Doug Williams, a principal in Tomasini-W2K. “Heinz doesn’t have a ‘multitude’ of varieties; it has 57. Bressler’s doesn’t have a ‘whole lot’ of flavors; it has 33. There aren’t ‘many’ deadly sins; there are seven.

“Well, eight, if you count vague writing.”

How can you make your message more colorful and credible with statistics?

What questions do you have about using statistics in your message?

Learn more about writing with statistics.

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