Better Data Communication
UW Social Sciences Building 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin
The Institute for Research on Poverty hosts seminars on the UW-Madison campus most Thursdays during the academic year. These presentations are free and open to the public. Room 8417.
media release: Speaker: Jonathan Schwabish, senior fellow, Tax and Income Supports Division, Urban Institute and Founder of PolicyViz
Co-sponsored with Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE) and Center for Demography of Health and Aging (CDHA)
Most academic reports and presentations bury great data under clutter, jargon, and bullet points nobody can follow. The result: insights that never land, findings that get overlooked, and audiences who tune out before the real point even arrives. It doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk, I share practical frameworks for cutting through the noise and making your data impossible to ignore. Drawing on real-world examples, I’ll demonstrate what separates charts that clarify from those that confuse, and presentations that resonate from those that get forgotten. You’ll leave with a concrete, repeatable toolkit: A way to think about your data before ever opening a chart tool, and a way to structure your delivery so audiences don’t just see your findings, they understand them, remember them, and act on them.
