Modern Finance
What Is Data Storytelling: The Art of Communicating Financial Data to a Non-Finance Audience
Read about how finance professionals can use data storytelling to turn complex financial data into compelling, strategic narratives.
Financial analysts often spend their days navigating a panoply of spreadsheets. Part of their job is not only to crunch the numbers, but to tell others what those numbers convey, and use data to guide key stakeholders’ next moves.
There can be a lot at stake. So, for FP&A teams staring down the prospect of a big financial presentation—perhaps a series of them—it can be nerve-wracking. It’s not enough that financial analysts need to source and analyze data from numerous sources, but they also need to turn that complex and abstract data into a compelling story.
Telling a company’s story through data is a skill, however, and one you can get better at. It’s possible to learn to read the room and make each presentation memorable—etch your message into your audience’s memory, be they a board of directors, your direct supervisor or even a group of investors.
In this guide, we’ll share our tips for delivering more impactful financial presentations, from gathering your data and creating your slides, to tapping into your inner Steve Jobs to bring down the house.
Most financial presentations are more or less going to include the same key elements: The presenter, the audience and the presentation itself—typically in the form of a Microsoft PowerPoint deck.
Although nobody’s expecting you to deliver the next Gettysburg Address, or the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, your job is to tell a story, not merely present data.
That story needs to resonate with the audience and help them understand why the key insights driven by the data are so important.
It all starts with thinking about your specific audience, then leveraging your presentation tools, and finally, delivering it all compellingly and confidently.
Nailing financial presentations as an FP&A professional comes down to three things: the data, the story and the visuals.
If you’ve ever read “The Art of War,” you know that understanding your adversary is perhaps the most critical aspect of any conflict.
While we’re not necessarily engaging in an assault or battle when giving a financial presentation, we are battling for the audience’s attention—a fight that’s increasingly difficult to win.
In the early 2000s, the average person’s attention span was around two and a half minutes. That’s since shrunk to about 47 seconds. Add in complex data and financial jargon, and you’ve got your work cut out for you.
This is all to say that before you create your presentation, it’s important to give some serious thought to who your target audience is, what it is that they care about and then consider how much information you need to provide or relay, accordingly. If they’re familiar with financial data, for instance, you may be able to tailor the presentation differently than you would for a general audience.
Ask yourself these questions about your audience when thinking about how to tailor your data and delivery:
You’re likely familiar with the Pareto Principle—also known as the “80/20 rule.” It states that the relationship between inputs and outputs isn’t typically balanced. Or, in other words, 20% of your effort should yield 80% of the results. So, you should focus on that impactful 20%, and make it count.
How can you apply that to a financial presentation? Consider this:
Taking all of this into consideration, you should be ready to sit down and flesh out your presentation.
The nuts and bolts of your presentation will likely involve a PowerPoint deck. While most people can throw together a basic slideshow, financial analysts face the task of making their presentations pop—which is, again, difficult when you’re dealing with advanced financial metrics.
But a good, broad strategy to keep in mind is that you should try to focus your slides on the 20% of the data that has the most impact on business outcomes. “Having the detail in your back pocket—whether it’s on a separate screen or even in an appendix somewhere—is always helpful to go into the weeds if you need,” says Domenic Colangelo, manager of FP&A at Vena. Concentrating on only the most impactful data will allow you to hammer at your audience, grab their attention and hopefully, hold their focus.
Aside from focusing on what you deem to be the most important or impactful data points, you should also strive to make the data accessible and digestible. The best way to do that is through the liberal use of visuals.
When it comes to making your presentation deck visually appealing, keep in mind these key principles.
Consider this: People are more likely to remember information conveyed through visuals rather than text.
Research shows that 75% of information processed in our brains is done so via visual communication—that’s because our brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does with the information contained in text. In all, 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is done so through our eyes (visuals), and accordingly, we’re hardwired, so to speak, to remember content more clearly if it's delivered through a visual format.
Suffice it to say that visuals are important. Here are a few tips to keep top of mind when working on them:
Your specific data set will dictate what sort of visual you want to use—for instance, a waterfall chart may be the most impactful for variance analyses, whereas a line graph may be the most illustrative for a financial forecast.
Here is some guidance on what type of data visualization to use based on your main goal for including that data.
Your slides, combining both visuals and text, should also adhere to your overarching narrative: they should employ a timeline of some sort, and your presentation should have a beginning, middle and end. A great framework for this is to have your slides start by explaining the “what,” then the “why” and the “how.”
While that’s not always easy to do, having an overarching structure for your presentation should help you design it more succinctly, help your audience remember and piece together all of the key information, and finally, keep it all consistent and moving in the same direction.
Vena can shoulder some of the burden of creating the presentation’s visuals—Vena integrates with PowerPoint to help create dynamic reports and data-rich decks, all with up-to-the-minute insights. That way, you as the analyst can focus on telling the story, rather than the grunt work of gathering and formatting data into the slides.
With the Vena for Microsoft PowerPoint integration, you can seamlessly pull data from your Vena reports into PowerPoint presentations and hit refresh any time those data points update. Say goodbye to manually updating your charts in your recurring reports every time a new month rolls around.
Finally, you need to stand up and deliver. Literally.
When preparing to deliver your presentation for an audience, it can be helpful to think back to the fundamentals of storytelling: You’re detailing a data-backed narrative that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That may incorporate an actual timeline (such as a quarterly or annual report), or follow a single metric. You should do your best to figure out what the narrative is and identify the key “acts” or “scenes” in the story.
When you’re weaving a narrative together, too, remember that your audience will stay engaged if you focus on the “what,” the “so what” and the “now what?”
Combining the narrative with your visuals (your deck) and some stage presence should help you nail the presentation. Of course, for many people, the delivery is the most difficult aspect of all.
With this in mind, here are some tips for delivering your presentation:
Remember, you want to deliver the data and tell a story, not simply talk to the audience. If it’s helpful, you can also rehearse your presentation in front of a mirror or a friend. Ask for feedback—it may help you build your confidence.
Delivering financial insights in an engaging and memorable way isn’t easy, but for many financial analysts, it’s a part of the job. Fortunately, Vena can help do some of the lifting as you prepare your presentation.
Vena’s native integration with PowerPoint helps you spend less time preparing and formatting your slides, so you can focus more of your time on analysis and how you’ll deliver the material.
Learn more about how you can use Vena to create data-driven presentations in minutes and elevate your data storytelling.
Enroll in Vena Academy's free Microsoft PowerPoint Certification and earn CPE/CPD credits.
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