When giving a presentation, it can be tempting to throw as much data as your audience can take. But without context, that data is often overlooked.
Many leaders and entrepreneurs who took a presentation skills class I recently led at Harvard were looking for tactics to improve how they communicate data. There’s a trick to presenting numbers in an impactful way. Once you know it, your presentations will be far more memorable.
Here’s the secret.
Put numbers into context.
According to scientists, the larger the number, the worse we are at understanding it. Our brains are made to visualize small numbers like one, two, three, and four. More than that, we start to say “several,” “many,” or “a lot.”
If you want to get really good at public speaking and delivering presentations, get good at making data relevant to the audience. Here’s an example.
As you’ve probably heard, Taylor Swift has ended her two-year Eras Tour. Swift’s camp sent the final numbers to The New York Times, and the statistics are staggering: 149 shows over 21 months in 19 countries drew 10 million fans and generated just over $2 billion in ticket sales.
Clearly, the previous sentence has far too many numbers in one sentence. It also contains too many numbers for the average person to grasp. And yet, most people giving a PowerPoint presentation on the report would likely try to squeeze every number on one slide.
Here’s a better way to present big numbers. Choose one or two numbers and add context around them. For example, if I were presenting the numbers, I would say:
Taylor Swift’s record-setting Eras Tour made a staggering $2 billion in ticket sales. That’s double the ticket sales of any concert in tour history. To put it into context, earlier this year Billboard magazine crowned Coldplay’s world tour the biggest rock tour of all time, and that tour took in $945 million. So, $2 billion in ticket sales for Taylor Swift doesn’t just surpass the previous record—it completely shatters it.
How brains work
By focusing on one number—in this case, gross ticket sales—and building a story around it, the data is easier to comprehend and much more interesting. Here’s another example:
Swift’s longest engagement was at Wembley Stadium, where, over eight nights, she played for 750,000 people. That’s about the number of people who live in Seattle.”
There’s brain science behind this tactic. Our brains evolved to process small quantities of information at any one time. Large numbers don’t have relatable real-world references, making them abstract and difficult to understand. Numbers in the hundreds of thousands, millions, and billions simply don’t compute for the average human.
Relatable comparisons
Scientists at Microsoft Research found that big numbers are easier to comprehend when placed into perspective. Perspective makes big numbers familiar because they provide context. The key is to make the comparison—context—as familiar as possible.
In the Taylor Swift example, if I were presenting the information to an audience outside of the U.S., I wouldn’t compare Swift’s numbers to the city of Seattle. I’d find a local city more familiar to the audience. The point is to make the comparison as relatable as possible.
The next time large numbers make news, check out the work of science or business writers. They know, through experience, that making numbers relatable makes the difference between reading an article or skipping over it. The same technique applies to presentations of any kind—make numbers relatable and the audience will relate to you.
