Data Fluency – and why it’s key to crafting good communications

Monica Molesag:

Since its inception, the communications discipline has been a craft built on language, narrative, and human understanding. For too long, data was perceived as a discipline from a foreign realm: one requiring different training, different tools, and posing different risks if you got it wrong. The typical response for communicators was to “leave it to the experts”. 

This instinct, however understandable, is one of the most limiting things a communications professional can do to their own impact, to the organization they represent, and to their own career. Sustainability communicators were the ones to learn this lesson first. 

We may be living in the post-truth era, but technology has made fact-checking instantaneous, and audiences have turned it into a sport. Getting a number wrong today may go further than just costing you credibility; it could go on to define you.

Lessons from Sustainability Communicators 

For most of its early history, sustainability communications operated at a safe distance from data.

Reports? Narrative-led. Commitments? Obviously directional. Claims? You guessed, aspirational.

The communicator’s job was to find the right words for the right audiences, and diligently package up the data from the sustainability team in the form of glossy reports and bold executive pledges. 

Soon enough, scrutiny started intensifying.

Investors began asking what targets had been set and what the underlying measurement methodology was. Regulators started examining whether claims were substantiated by verifiable evidence. Journalists developed the tools and the motivation to check numbers against disclosures, disclosures against science, and science against stated commitments. The communicator unable to read the data underpinning their own story was suddenly and visibly vulnerable.

You may think that the organisations that navigated this well just hired more analysts; they didn’t.

Instead, they took the time to develop communicators who were experts at adding a sophisticated layer of scrutiny: understanding what a number means, identifying the boundary conditions of a claim and translating all of that into language that makes decisions possible for people who are not data specialists. And one of my personal favourites, sitting with a number long enough to understand what it is not saying, and which context is missing. 

What Data Fluency Actually Means

In practice, I have found that data fluency and scrutiny in communications come down to four habits that can be developed by anyone willing to invest in them:

1. Asking the boundary question:

   Every data point has a boundary; whether it’s a scope, a methodology or a set of assumptions that determine what it includes and what it leaves out. When a number arrives for inclusion in a piece of external communication, the fluent communicator asks: what is this measuring, exactly? What does it not measure? What would change this figure, and over what timeframe? These questions are editorial in nature, and entirely within a communicator’s remit to ask.

2. Understanding the difference between correlation and causation, projection and commitment:

   These distinctions matter enormously for how a claim is framed, and getting them wrong is one of the most common sources of credibility damage in corporate communications. A communicator who cannot make these distinctions is dependent on others making them, and that dependency is a professional risk.

3. Reading a dataset for the story that’s not being told:

   Data is curated. What appears in a report or a briefing represents choices about what to include, what to contextualise, and what to leave out. The fluent communicator reads those choices as editorial decisions and asks whether the picture being presented is the complete one. Because incomplete data in external communications is precisely where credibility erodes.

4. How to sit with uncertainty:

   Not every number is clean. Some projections will not be reliable. The communicator who has developed data fluency knows when to say that a figure is an estimate, that a trend is directional rather than definitive, or that a target is aspirational rather than guaranteed. In the current environment, that precision is the most credible thing you can say.

The Stakes are Now the Same

For early sustainability communicators, the feedback loop between data quality and communications credibility has been short and unforgiving. Across the wider communications profession, this loop is also being shortened. 

Audiences in the financial, consumer, regulatory, media sectors are more data-literate than they were five years ago, and more motivated to use that literacy to test what organisations claim. The communicator who delegates data entirely, who treats numbers as the domain of specialists and only narrative as their own separate territory, is increasingly operating with a gap in their professional capability that their stakeholders can see, even if they themselves cannot.

The most effective communication campaigns are those built both on data and narrative: data that gives the story credibility and narrative that gives the data meaning. Neither works without the other.

Where to Start

If you are a communications professional who has historically kept data at arm’s length, the path forward is simpler than it might feel: begin with a habit. Next time a number arrives in your inbox for inclusion in a piece of external communication, do not pass it straight to your design or copywriting department. Spend 15 minutes understanding it, ask who produced it and how, what it includes and what it leaves out. Ask what has changed since this figure was last reported, and why. Ask whether the claim being built on it is proportionate to what the data actually supports.

Those questions will feel slow at first or they might even feel like they belong to someone else’s job. Spoiler alert: they no longer do. They are the questions that determine whether the communication you produce will hold up under scrutiny. In a world where scrutiny is the default, that is the only question that matters.

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Monica Molesag is Global Head of Sustainability Communications, SAP