Earlier this week I discussed some of the characteristics of great statistics and shared a few reasons stats can be so powerful for businesses and nonprofits. When you don’t have a research department churning out reports, the best bet is to find publicly available statistics and rethink them. Of course we do this without changing the underlying research data or making things up that can’t be supported by the data.

How Water.org uses stats

Water.org is perhaps one the best nonprofits at using stats to tell a simple powerful story. Here’s the evolution of how they take a so-so stat from publicly available information and transform it into a powerful stat that tells a story and is eminently shareable.

The original statistic comes from a Unicef and World Health Organization study on the impact of diarrhoea on children’s health. It is 68 pages in length and chock full of research and data about an incredibly important topic. The original statistic comes early in the report and is stated like this:

Why is diarrhoea, an easily preventable and treatable disease, one in the developed world is considered little more than an inconvenience, causing an estimated 1.5 million under-five deaths every year?

Buried in this long sentence is a powerful human stat with an immense emotional potential.

Why is this stat underperforming?

Problem 1: The stat tries to explain too much and doesn’t use human terms.

• Using diarrhoea in the stat might make sense because the focus of the report, but it requires lots of medical explanations and a context between developed and undeveloped worlds. Because this stat is a coming from a research report, it also uses the term “under-fives” which is never used by regular people…ever.

Fix: Further into the report, it becomes clear that the real problem is unclean water. Switching the focus to water and removing the reference to a specific condition makes the problem and the solution very easy to understand. In addition, getting rid of “under-fives” lets us know that these are real children, not a demographic group. Cleaning up the order of the words also gives the stat more clarity:

Every year, 1.5 million children die from water-related illnesses.

The stat is starting to become more readable and understandable, but it is guilty of another sin.

Problem 2: The stat is too big and abstract.

• 1.5 million is an inconceivably high number. People cannot grasp that number of people and compare it to 250,000 or 50,000. All are numerical abstractions and have no benchmark to a single human being.

Possible Fix: Benchmark the stat to a city that makes the number at least graspable:

Every year more children die from water-related illness than the entire population of Phoenix, Arizona.

The wording gets a little chunky with this fix, but at least we have something to benchmark this impossibly large number of children against.

Better Fix: Forget about numbers of children and scale this stat to another benchmark, time. Do a little math to compare number of children to seconds in a year, and we change this stat to something like this:

Every 21 seconds a child dies from a water-related illness.

Now that is a powerful stat that gives a clear picture to the problem, scales the reality of the problem down to one child, and connects directly back to the work of the charity Water.org.

Remember, most people will not have the time to understand the work you do. Water.org gets this and you can see it in every stat on their website. Every stat they use is remarkable and makes you stand back in awe of a problem you did not know existed, the numbers they use are scaled to a 1-to-1 human relationship and the language is straightforward and easy to understand. Every stat is also a story in the barest of fragments that gets activated when shared:

Every 21 seconds a child dies from a water-related illness
Water.org

The problem: Unclean water kills children.
What can reader/listener assume Water.org does?: Provides clean water.
Core story: Water.org/clean water saves children.

That’s how one little stat can tell a story and invite people to join your mission. I’ll be showing what types of things get shared in social media and spread via word of mouth in future posts. Let me know in the comment section if there is something else you are struggling with in communicating your nonprofit’s or business’s story.