How to Use Charts and Graphs in PR Presentations

Numbers are unavoidable.

A sea of numbers on a page may make sense to an accountant. For a presentation or press conference that explains budgets or statistics, you need transform those numbers into charts or graphs.

I won't get into how to make amazing pie charts in Excel or 3-D line graphs in PowerPoint. What I'm concerned about here is using charts and graphs in public relations, specifically presentations and press conferences.

There are great advantages to doing this. Talking about numbers can be insanely boring or confusing. A chart will let people understand the issue in a glance.

Here are some guidelines for using charts and graphs:

1) The 10-foot test

What looks huge from two feet away, on your computer monitor, may look tiny from 10 feet away once it's printed onto posterboard or put on a projector screen.

Test out your presentation in realistic conditions. Have somebody sit where your audience will sit. All the words and numbers on your charts and graphs need to be visible and clear.

2) Pitfalls with numbers

Reporters will want to know a lot about your numbers. They'll want to know the sources for all your charts and graphs. They'll want to see the studies and ask other experts if the numbers make sense.

Do a little pre-emptive checking of your own. Ask an expert to take a critical swing at your charts and graphs before you finalize them.

There's also the matter of perspective. Advertisers and marketers are quite aware about how the eyes tricks the brain when it comes to numbers. "$7.00" looks bigger than "$7" which looks bigger than "7" -- and that's why many high-end restaurants omit the dollar sign and the decimal point with two zeros. They go with a plain old "7" to make the price look smaller.

Whatever choice you make in terms of format, stick with it.

3) Different formats for different media

Newspapers will appreciate not having to take a photo of your chart and fiddle with it to make it print-quality. Have a high-definition JPEG version of all charts that you can email to reporters and make sure they know about it.

TV stations will likely shoot the charts and use them for B-roll, which is film they run to break up a piece while the announcer is talking. If you have a chart that's animated, they may want that rather than a static image.

Either way, newspapers and TV stations may want what works in real life in a different format. Any kind of computer image -- whether it's a laptop screen or a PowerPoint slideshow -- will have a flicker when played on television, because the frame rate is different.

Be ready to give them raw files in whatever format they'd like.

A good rule for charts and graphs is to talk to reporters before the event, to see what they need. Technology changes fast, and different papers, TV and radio stations have different systems and needs.