Facts, no matter how accurate, won’t change culture on their own

Here's how to make good use of big data

Raw data doesn’t lead people to change their minds about a topic, and certainly isn’t compelling enough to drive a person to take action. 

A chef (messenger) can have the best ingredients (facts), but without the right recipe (memorable and/or relatable message), the meal is unappetizing. You don’t gulp down a spoonful of flour, but you’ll enjoy a sandwich and cookies. That’s basically why storytelling recipes are useful for housing, transportation, land use, preservation, property rights—regardless of your particular point of view. 

A trendline about traffic crashes or a bar chart about housing stock are just raw ingredients in a bowl. Facts are important, but they aren’t the final thing that you serve to an audience. Fortunately for us, recipes are endless and the potential for creative teaching and persuading is limitless. 

German satire illustrating the unfeminine nature of smoking

Edward Bernays, father of public relations, understood the need to use storytelling recipes in order to influence public opinion. For good and for evil, his world-changing work demonstrated that facts about any topic are weak without emotional hooks. He spent years testing many of the theories of his famous uncle, Sigmund Freud.

Age-old customs, I learned, could be broken down by a dramatic appeal. 

—Edward Bernays

In the early 1900s, smoking was considered a taboo for women. What’s a cigarette company to do when half the country is shamed out of buying your product? Hire Edward Bernays, that’s what.

Bernays orchestrated a famous campaign branding cigarettes as "torches of freedom,” brilliantly linking smoking to first wave feminism. During the 1929 Easter parade in New York, he arranged for debutantes to walk in front of the press (with cameras ready), light cigarettes, and strut in what was spun as a dramatic stand for women's liberation. 

In newspapers and magazines across the country, women smoking was now linked with the fight for equality. The next day on the front page of the New York Times: Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of "Freedom"

If you’re working in a field like architecture, engineering, planning, or construction, then you’ve been told your entire career about the importance of proper calculations and documenting facts. If your math is too far off, the bridge will fall down or the house will collapse. If your decimal is too far off, your bid for the contract will be too low. 

Accurate data is important when you plan or design a thing, but raw story ingredients will not

• persuade town council to approve the traffic calming budget.

• convince the neighbors to see the value of zoning reform. 

• change reckless driving behavior. 

Venn diagrams, heat maps, and pie charts are ubiquitous in reports and presentations about land use and infrastructure. But even if the data is true and verifiable, the audience could not care less. What so many professionals don’t understand is that the facts need memorable framing. 

Most of us know someone who has a child with a peanut allergy, and most of us parents have heard a story about a near-death incident involving a peanut reaction. Those stories drive people to action, because everyone cares about protecting kids from serious harm, especially preventable harm. So it might interest you to know that for every one peanut allergy death, the US experiences about 30,000 traffic deaths. 

That’s one chemical death to every 30,000 traffic deaths. The threat of a deadly chemical reaction leads to dedicated activism. Meanwhile, driving children to the doctor for an allergy test is far more likely to cause harm than walking into a school.

People will always react to raw scientific data with a shrug. Once you understand that, you’ll be a much more effective storyteller. Americans race to support a Peanut Vision Zero but can’t be bothered by a Traffic Vision Zero. 

You won’t win over everyone, even when you’re using story recipes instead of raw story ingredients. The more emotion someone has already invested in a topic, the more likely they’ll remain steadfast in their opinion. The next time you're preparing a presentation or a blog post, consider how to make an emotional impact with your facts and figures. Introduce an idea or experience that will surprise and motivate people.

Similar to meal prep, it’s easier than you might think. You don’t need to be an extrovert or marketer or all-around loudmouth. Start with just a little bit of raw data and find a way to make some sense of it.