Case study · Storytelling with data
A walkthrough of how we turn a 24-month enrollment dataset into a story that lands. Scroll on. The figure on the right responds as you go.
Numbers shown are sample data, modeled on real engagement patterns. The structure of the story, and the way each chart annotation reveals, mirrors how we work with research teams.
01 · The question
The team brought us monthly enrollment counts across seven clinics in a multi-site outreach program, two years of data, one figure.
The first job is to draw the most honest baseline you can. No annotations, no spin. Just the line.
02 · The first signal
Enrollment held a steady ~210 per month, then dropped to 168 at month 8. The team had noticed it but not isolated it. The figure, with a single annotation, makes the moment unambiguous.
This is what we mean by “visualization that earns the next conversation.” The annotation is the conversation starter.
03 · Disaggregate
Splitting the same line into seven cohorts shows the dip is not regional. Three clinics were unaffected. Four moved together. This is the kind of disaggregation reviewers ask for, and that policy stakeholders need before they will act.
In the live build of this figure, each line is keyboard-accessible and the colors are colorblind-safe.
04 · The co-factor
The four affected clinics were all in the same county. A six-month outreach grant lapsed at month 7. Adding the event marker turns a coincidence into a hypothesis the team can defend.
This is the moment in a research narrative where a chart stops being descriptive and starts being explanatory.
05 · Intervention & recovery
The team funded a focused re-engagement push in the affected county. Three of the four clinics recovered to baseline by month 20. The remaining one stayed below trend. The figure now carries cause and consequence in a single frame.
Decks built on figures like this hold up in a room full of skeptics.
06 · The finding
The summary statement, anchored in the visual: a targeted county-level shock produced an eight-month enrollment dip of about 14% across affected clinics. Outreach closed roughly half of that gap within six months.
That single sentence, paired with this figure, is what shows up in the abstract, the funder report, and the slide that earns the meeting.
You scrolled through a six-step narrative. The figure on the right reshaped itself at each step, but the underlying dataset never changed. That is the move: same data, different revealing of it. A single sentence at a time, paired with one annotation at a time, is how research findings actually get internalized by a non-technical reader.
This page is a demo, but the structure is real. We build these for white papers, grant deliverables, and the kind of board-meeting decks where one figure has to do a lot of work.
