Celebrate Your Data!
How to hold a data party with your coalition
After a major data collection campaign (like the End Commercial Tobacco Campaign!), it's important to take some time to celebrate your hard work! Then, the inevitable question arises: Now what?
The good news is, you can keep the celebratory energy going even in the analysis and reporting phase! One of our favorite ways to do this is by holding a data party.
What is a data party?
Data parties are a form of participatory data analysis that engage stakeholders in making sense of the data in a group setting, reviewing and discussing the results, and then drawing conclusions and identifying actionable recommendations.
Data parties move beyond reporting data and help stakeholders answer important questions such as:
- What does this data mean for our community?
- What patterns or disparities are emerging?
- What additional context should we consider?
- What actions should we take next?
By bringing together different perspectives, data parties can generate new insights, strengthen stakeholder buy-in, and support collaborative decision-making.
How to prepare data for a data party
"A party without cake is just a meeting."
— Julia Child
You may or may not decide to include cake in your data party, but if you're inviting the community to help you interpret results, try to make it as welcoming and fun as possible! Food, games, and fun ways of engaging with the data are all important parts of the process.
(We can speak from experience— the TCEC team has held data parties that included cake, snacks, egg hunts, and puzzles, among other things!)
Of course, one of the most important aspects of a successful data party is deciding how to present the data.
While comprehensive reports and data packets contain valuable information, they can sometimes feel overwhelming for participants to review and interpret during a discussion. Consider how you can reduce cognitive load and focus attention on the findings that are most relevant to the decisions your group needs to make.
Depending on your audience and goals, data can be presented in many ways, including conventional formats like presentations, or more surprising formats, like data findings in fortune cookies!
The goal is not necessarily to share every available data point, but rather to organize information in a way that supports interpretation, discussion, and action.
When preparing materials, consider the key questions you want participants to explore and select data to inform those conversations.
Data placemats
One format that works particularly well during data parties is a data placemat.
A data placemat is a visual discussion tool that organizes thematically related data, charts, quotes, and contextual information into a concise, easy-to-understand format to support collaborative interpretation and decision-making. It's a highly visual, 1-2-page tool used at that party to present key data points, charts, and quotes for discussion.
The idea is that you have everything that you need to show up for a conversation (or a meal) right in front of you!
Rather than requiring participants to sort through lengthy reports, placemats highlight the most important findings and create a shared visual space for discussion. By bringing key findings together in one place, we make them easier to discuss and interpret as a group.
Think of the data party as the conversation and the data placemat as one of the tools that helps guide that conversation.
Why use data placemats?
A well-designed placemat allows participants to focus on the key takeaways and spend more time discussing what the findings mean rather than trying to figure out what the data says.
At their core, placemats are really about making data more user-friendly and discussion-friendly. Placemat discussions help organize these conversations into a shared interpretation process!
They allow you to:
- Quickly summarize and convey complex information
- Identify and compare patterns, trends, and disparities
- Explore local conditions and context
- Discuss findings collaboratively
- Generate new questions and insights that will ultimately support priority setting and action planning
Remember that this data is for the community!
Evaluators and program staff should always keep in mind the concept of reciprocity: sharing results with the community from which the data were collected. Think about how to make the findings accessible to different stakeholders and what information they need to see. How can you repackage it, format it, and deliver it in ways that align with their capacities and needs? This is one step toward greater data equity in tobacco prevention.
The goal is not simply to collect data from communities… it is just as important to share results back with them in ways that empower them to understand, discuss, and act on that data.
We’re essentially meeting them where they are, and giving them the resources so that they can show up and participate authentically in those conversations surrounding community readiness and local needs!