Editor’s Note: This was originally published on our sister site, NewQual. It was so clear, concise and useful I wanted to share it with all of you. By the way, if you don’t regularly check out NewQual as well, you’re missing out; there is some truly wonderful content being created and shared there!

By Julie Diaz Asper

It’s showtime! Often overlooked in business situations is the need to “entertain” or at least “capture the imagination” of your audience. Seen Seth Godin speak? I still think about purple cows after seeing his Ted Talk video about How to Get Your Ideas to Spread almost 5 years ago.

Like it or not, we live in a Facebook, Twitter and YouTube world. You need to put on a good show, from weekly team meetings to the boardroom. Think of yourself as a content producer!

Below I have done a roundup of easy to use DIY, free or almost free, online tools that can give your research reports some pop. Some are well known and a few are more obscure.

Picktochart: Create an Infographic

It’s been the year of the infographic. And for good reason! Infographics force you to think about which data is critical and how it ties together. Picktochart offers a really easy way to create infographics with great looking templates and an easy-to-use interface. I used it to create our Pinterest & Brands Infographic without any help from my graphic designers.

Prezi: Getting Beyond Powerpoints!

Prezi is a wildly popular tool offering beautiful templates that are interactive and make embedding pictures and videos easy. Even my middle schooler is using it for presentations at school. And so should you.

Storify: Create a Story from Social Media Posts

Mining social media (your own social accounts, top influencers, your competition) is a great way to add pop to your internal reports and presentations. Storify makes it easy to capture social media examples to create a storyline.

PicMonkey: Photo Edit like a Pro

Creating fun images with captions and effects is simple with PicMonkey. It’s a robust photo editing tool that is a favorite among my bloggers. It’s also great for resizing and cropping images too. I use PicMonkey almost daily.

Go Animate: Get Animated

Go Animate makes it simple to create compelling videos for your research reports. Creating a video does require some work but I think you can impress your boss or client with this one.

Toondoo: Cartoon it

Creating a cartoon is a bit more difficult and requires some creativity, but for cartoonist wannabes Toondoo is a great tool. So if you’ve ever felt you were living a Dilbert moment while looking at research results this might be the tool for you.

There are many, many more tools out there to build a better story. What are your favorites?

data analytics online research storytelling

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Julie Diaz-Asper

Founding Partner at Social Lens Research

3 articles

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