Data: A Health Story (with Eric Ratinoff)

In the world of public health, data rules. Data helps us advance understanding and inform decision making.

But to much of the public, data is just a bunch of numbers. It’s not personal, memorable, or meaningful — so it’s usually not persuasive, either, no matter how exciting or alarming it may be to those inside the health professions. So if so much of health communication aims to motivate behavior change, why do we keep trying to persuade people with data? Isn’t there some other way?

Actually, there is: You can bake that data into a story.

In this presentation, we’ll show how to find the story within the data, and tell that story in a way that will help audiences not only understand the data, but also see the world in which that data lives — their world — differently.

This event is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Plymouth State University.

Eric Ratinoff is the founder and Chief Storyteller of Story First, a strategic storytelling firm that helps companies and organizations get clear about their story and tell it more effectively.

Story First works with a wide range of non-profit, corporate, educational, and political clients from across the United States. Eric has presented on storytelling in health communication at the American Public Health Association annual conference and at the CDC’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media; and has been invited to speak about storytelling to university, corporate, and non-profit audiences.

Eric is also a co-founder and principal in The Mouse and the Elephant, a diversity, equity, and inclusion training and consulting firm. He served as the Executive Editor for the Ferguson Commission report, Forward Through Ferguson; and co-authored A Seat at the Table, an award-winning column on diversity and inclusion in the New Hampshire Business Review. Eric also spoke at TEDxCapeMay in New Jersey, with a talk titled “Once Upon a Time At The Office: How Stories Shape Culture At Work.”

Eric previously taught Technical Writing in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in English.