Persuading with Data

This interactive course will give you the opportunity to improve your communication skills through practice and detailed feedback from the instructor and your classmates. You will have the opportunity to use that feedback to improve a current slide or presentation you are working on. 

By the end of this class, you will emerge with impactful materials, useful frameworks, and an improved ability to persuade others with data through data storytelling.

No matter how good machines and algorithms get, leaders will still need the ability to influence and persuade others to make the best possible decisions based on the technology and data at hand. Whether your job requires you to communicate with leaders, colleagues, clients, or customers, you need to simplify and clarify your findings for your audience in order to persuade with data.

This course is taught by Miro Kazakoff, a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan, entrepreneur, and consultant focused on how individuals use data to persuade others. As a participant in this interactive course, you will learn professional and practical skills required to develop, design, and deliver high-quality, logical communications grounded in quantitative data. You will learn how to craft clear and powerful narratives to guide audiences through your data and understand why the insights are important. You will also explore ways in which visual tools such as graphs, charts, and diagrams can be used in data storytelling to highlight your insights in a way that spreadsheets and dashboards cannot. You will leave this course a better data storyteller than you came.

This is not a course about analytics tools; it is focused on communication skills. You will need access to a form of slide presentation software (e.g., PowerPoint, KeyNote, or Google) and a tool for visualizing data (Excel, Tableau, etc.). Come with a graph you can edit and improve.