How to Tell a Powerful Public Health Story with Data Visualization

The public health industry is full of data that tells powerful stories; it’s our job to tell those stories in a way that positively influences policy and public perception. As public health practitioners, we rely on widely-used data sets like BRFSS and NHANES, we monitor worldwide social media conversations, we leverage census data, and we make decisions based on information in databases and spreadsheets created by our own organizations.  We’re tasked with unearthing the stories in this data, and then making those stories accessible and relevant--to the media, to policy-makers, to grant issuers and to advocacy groups, both regionally and globally.  

Today, using a completely free data visualization tool, public health organizations around the world are telling important stories by creating and sharing interactive visualizations of data. Users of this tool include journalists from USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, La Nacion and O Globo; educational institutions like Princeton, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon; and non-profits like the South Carolina Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, the UK’s Medway Youth Trust, and the University of Illinois’ Health Media Collaboratory. They use data visualization to explore information and share powerful, interactive, data-driven stories with key decision-makers.

In this session, we’ll demonstrate how anyone who’s passionate about the stories behind data can create interactive data visualizations, and we’ll share specific examples of how public health organizations are raising their game by doing this. There’s no need to have a technical background; anyone who can use Excel can easily learn to visualize data. You’ll walk away from this session with knowledge of how to build and share interactive maps, charts and graphs that tell meaningful, influential data stories that can be quickly customized for any audience.