This article is part of our Member Spotlight program where we aim to shine a spotlight on SWD community members who are contributing outstanding work. These are people who contribute in ways that foster an even more connected and diverse learning environment. Our goal is to help you get to know your fellow community members a little better and learn from one another.

This month, we’re shining our spotlight on Lisa Carlson, who has been a long-time supporter of storytelling with data. Lisa works as both a database administrator (DBA) and technology systems lead for non-profits and as an instructor for the University of Washington’s Data Visualization Certificate Program—an eight-month curriculum for professionals to improve their data communication skills. Last semester, in the fall of 2020, I had the chance to get to know Lisa better through her teaching work.

Lisa led a cohort of students in their first course of the program, “Data Visualization Theory: a practical introduction.” This course covers the basics of statistics, data viz history, and introduces Tableau—all of which culminates in a final data visualization project to be presented to the class. Leading up to this project, Lisa reached out to SWD to see if we would be interested in joining one of the weekly lectures to help students prepare for their presentations.

During the lecture, I presented a version of our presenting data webinar. I shared a few tips for presenting and covered some low-tech planning tools—the Big Idea, the 3-minute story—to help students craft their data stories. For this particular lecture, I emphasized how the 3-minute story technique could apply to their final presentations, ending the lecture with an example 3-minute story using data and slides.

The 3-minute story is exactly what its name implies: you have three minutes to tell your audience everything they need to know about your data—from beginning to end. The point is not to cram as many words as possible into those three minutes, but rather to force yourself to let go of details that don’t need to be there. There is so much benefit to editing yourself down and being concise, which is the reason Lisa implemented a three-minute constraint on her students’ final presentations.

On her website, Lisa outlines many benefits for telling concise data stories, one of which is that it will build your confidence as a presenter:

Memorizing and rehearsing a three-minute presentation is easier than preparing a 20-minute presentation where you cover every detail on a topic (and, in the process, put your audience to sleep). A 3-minute story is a win-win for both the presenter and the audience. Most presenters can confidently speak for three minutes, and the audience’s attention span should hold for that long (even though there is evidence that our attention span is now a mere eight seconds). Limiting your presentation to three minutes will make you look like you have mastered the topic.

To read more about Lisa’s thoughts on the benefits of the 3-minute story, check out her related article.

According to Lisa, the three-minute presentations from last semester were a huge success!

Compared to previous presentation class sessions when students did not receive training on how to master the 3-minute story presentation, this semester’s final project presentations were amazing! Providing a framework (using the Big Idea) and spelling out constraints (a three-minute limit) made our final project presentation night flawless time-wise. Each presentation effectively piqued the interest of the audience.

Lisa shared a few samples of those final projects on her blog—impressive!

The 3-minute story was the perfect strategy for students’ final presentations delivered virtually, and in quick succession. Consider too how this could be useful beyond a classroom setting. The virtual environment makes it challenging to keep your audience’s attention as you compete against many distractions. Whether it’s for sharing a final project or going around the “Zoom-room” to provide updates in a business meeting, concision is key.

Lisa is passionate about helping her students learn to communicate better and inspire action with their data, and has invited some of her students to join in on the Member Spotlight conversation. If you want to learn more about Lisa’s teaching work, garner more thoughts on the 3-minute story technique (from Lisa or past students), pop over to the community, and chat directly with her this month.

Congrats, Lisa, on a well-deserved Member Spotlight!

There are plenty of noteworthy members in the community—too many to spotlight at once. This program is part of our larger efforts to find new ways to share multiple voices and experiences. As you discover great work and ideas in the community, be sure to give appropriate kudos and spread the word!