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How to Deliver Data That People Will Trust

People won’t use data they don’t trust, but you can build trust by communicating what the data means and how it was collected.

By Grace Olson  |  December 18, 2024

The job of communicating data gets easier if everyone remembers one thing:

“Behind every data point is a person,” Brennan McMahon Parton, vice president of state policy and advocacy at the Data Quality Campaign, told a session of NCSL’s Base Camp 2024. “Data is about people, and it’s important to make sure your communications reflect that reality.”

Parton says that data work is as much about communication as anything else. People won’t use data they don’t trust, but you can build trust by communicating what the data means and how it was collected.

“Data is about people, and it’s important to make sure your communications reflect that reality.”

—Brennan McMahon Parton, Data Quality Campaign

She says there’s a general mistrust of data among people who are affected by it when they are unsure how it will be used. For example, teachers might be skeptical of data collected about their students if they aren’t told how it will be communicated and consumed.

Parton says legislators are generally viewed as data owners but are often also data consumers as they need numbers and evidence to inform the policymaking process.

“You sometimes get stuck with your producer hat on because those are the state and system leaders who can build trust in data through transparency,” Parton says. “So even if you are the consumer, you may also have this conduit role in producing trust.”

Transparency and Context

She says one way to build trust is to be a critical consumer and question how data was gathered to see if it accurately portrays a situation and if anything needs to be adjusted or collected to make it more precise. Parton says consumers drive quality: Data collection will improve only if people critique it.

“By being transparent with information, by interrogating what does this mean and for whom and why—that’s feedback back into the data, that’s feedback back into the numbers, the evidence, the research.”

Additionally, she says the key to increasing clarity and an audience’s confidence in data is to provide context about how it was collected and why, to frame it in a way that focuses on what individuals and communities bring to the table instead of any deficits, and to show an audience how proximal the data is to their work.

“When we fail to include that context as producers, as leaders, consumers are set up to jump straight to assumptions about what the data means or dismiss it,” Parton says. “So, you want to think about providing as much contextual information as possible.”

Simple Message, Multiple Voices

Keep your data communications as simple as possible and say exactly what you mean. Consumers won’t be receptive to data if they feel like they’re being bombarded with academic language, or if the communicator is unclear about the data’s meaning, Parton says, adding that this takes a lot of hard work for many people, but it’s worth it.

She says a way to lessen that load is to equip as many messengers as possible to relay data to different audiences. Different voices give different perspectives or even different pushback, so it’s good to know who is best suited to address specific audiences.

“Equipping messengers is so important and probably one of the hardest things to do,” Parton says. “Particularly if you’re a state actor, not being the only person who shares a message.”

Repeating Is a Good Thing

A good way to stay on top of data communication is to be proactive, Parton says. Send out data early and often—don’t wait until there’s an issue to send information out for the first time. She says messages about data need to be shared repeatedly before they’re realized by an audience.

“You have to get across a message two or three or four or five or six times to really get it across,” she says. “If you’re really trying to foster a conversation and really build trust, it’s going to take feeling like you’re saying it over and over and over to get there, and ideally having others who can also say it over and over and again to get there and being proactive. Again, this sounds so simple, but it’s actually a very strategic, thoughtful, planful thing we have to do.”

Overall, Parton says, data is crucial to consumers so they have what they need to be informed.

“Individuals and communities can and should ask questions that unpack decisions that shape the data,” she says. “It’s important to ensure that consumers of your data have the information they need to have the answers to their questions, and all of this is in service of building trust.”

Grace Olson was a 2024 summer intern in NCSL’s Communications Division.

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