Purpose and Need. Public health professionals in rural and frontier communities have access to a lot of powerful stories in their community health assessments, program reports, surveillance data, and field observations, but most don't exactly know how to turn those data into a narrative that resonates with community members, school boards, and local media who need to hear it. Data storytelling is a learnable, practical skill, and it is one of the best communication tools available to small, under-resourced health departments trying to demonstrate impact, build trust, and make the case for public health investment. This session teaches the basics: what data storytelling is, why it works, and how to build a story from data you already have.
Content and Best Practices. The session opens with a 20-minute interactive framing block grounded in a five-element data storytelling framework: context, relevance, clarity, connection, and call to action. The presenter will introduce each element using a worked rural public health example that walks participants through the full arc from raw data point to audience-ready story. Content addresses how to find the story in your data, how to frame it for a non-technical local audience, how to pair data with narrative without distorting either, and how to close with a call to action specific enough to act on. Examples draw from real community health work in small, rural jurisdictions.
Hands-On Activity and Share-Out. Following the framing block, participants work in small groups for 20-30 minutes on a rural communication challenge using a fictional rural Colorado county case set — a composite mountain and agricultural community with a seasonal workforce, tourism economy, and wildfire exposure whose profile mirrors other rural and frontier communities across the state. Each group receives a jargon-heavy public health text and a pre-assigned local audience, such as county commissioners, agricultural workers, or rural seniors, and works together to translate the text into a plain-language story using the five-element framework. A full-group share-out follows, with each group presenting their translation and the facilitator drawing out key differences in how the same data story shifts across audiences. This discussion is where the deepest learning happens. Participants leave having heard multiple approaches to the same problem and having reflected on what made each one work for their community.
Relevance to the Conference Theme. Data storytelling is, at its core, a Stronger Together practice: it only works when public health professionals listen carefully enough to their communities to know what a story needs to say, and when they trust their audiences enough to speak plainly.
Instructional Methodology. The session uses adult-learning best practices throughout, including interactive framing with a working example, collaborative small-group skill practice, and structured full-group reflection.
