Data Storytelling for Analysts — Kade Instituut Rotterdam

This programme is for analysts, policy officers and researchers who produce sound numbers that nobody acts on. Over eight weeks you rebuild a piece of your own reporting — one dataset, one chart, one five-minute story — with weekly feedback from a working data journalist.

By the final evening you present that work to the group and leave with a version you can send to your director the next morning.

What you will learn

Explain the trade-offs between a bar chart, a line chart and a plain table for a given question, and defend the choice to a sceptical stakeholder.
Build a three-chart narrative that carries an audience from finding to decision in five minutes.
Evaluate a colleague's chart against a checklist of scale, colour, labelling and denominator errors.
Rewrite a dense results table as one annotated chart with a headline a reader can quote back to you.

Programme

Finding the story in the data

Weeks 1–2 · 8 hours

Interrogate a dataset until it yields one claim you are willing to defend in writing.

The question behind the request
Exploratory charts you throw away
Base rates, denominators and outliers
Writing the one-sentence finding

Choosing the right chart

Weeks 3–4 · 8 hours

Match the chart form to the comparison you are actually making.

Comparison, composition, distribution, correlation
When a table beats a chart
Scales, axes and the zero-baseline argument
Colour as data, colour as decoration

Designing for the reader

Weeks 5–6 · 8 hours

Strip a chart back until only the message survives.

Hierarchy, annotation and direct labelling
Accessible colour and type contrast
Small multiples and the density budget
Rebuilding a published chart, critique included

Telling it in the room

Weeks 7–8 · 8 hours

Carry the finding into a meeting and leave with a decision.

Structuring the five-minute version
Answering the hostile question
Portfolio clinic and dry run
Final presentation and peer review