it's your legacy... Entrustet HIWI Blog

By Jesse Davis, co-founder, Entrustet

Having 3-4 compelling “go-to” statistics in your back pocket will do your startup a whole world of help when it comes to the press, pitching investors, selling consumers, and negotiating partnerships. Nothing turns a passive observer into an engaged participant faster than a really intriguing statistic that gets your point across, whatever your point may happen to be. Here are some thoughts on how to go about creating a compelling statistic:

Step 1. What point are you trying to get across?

The first step is to carefully consider what point you’d like your statistic(s) to get across. That is, what do you want your audience to take away from your pitch? When they are walking out of the room, what lasting-impression do you wish to have burned into their brains? For example, let’s say you’re a social networking mobile app developer, and you need to prove that you’re a worthwhile investment opportunity. I’d say then, that you need a good statistic that shows how popular mobile social networking apps are and will be in the future.

Step 2. How can you prove that point with a simple, clear, yet loud statistic?

Sometimes the answer will be right in front of your eyes. Sticking with our example of the social networking mobile app developer, let’s say you do a google search for “minutes spent social networking on mobile device” and you find a link to the statistic below:

People spend 45 minutes a day social networking online. Also, people spend more time on Facebook’s mobile app than on Facebook.com on their computer. Those stats alone are pretty telling, but we’re not done proving our point. Forty-five minutes per day is a lot, but we need a context to really hammer the point home:

Step 3: How to deepen the influence of your statistic

To make the statistic above more impressive, let’s consider framing it in comparison to something else. What’s another thing Americans do for roughly 45 minutes per day? Hmm….Well, I think people probably commute about 45 minutes per day to and from work. If we could prove that people spend as much time on Facebook’s mobile app as they do getting to and from work, then we’d really have a compelling statistic. So, let’s do a google search for “average commute time.” Sure enough, I stumbled upon a 2003 U.S. census survey that showed the average American spends 24.3 minutes driving each way to work. That’s almost exactly 45 minutes a day commuting! Here’s a link to the article on it.

Step 4: Figure out a succinct way to get the statistic across

You’ve gotta frame your stat nice and succinctly to people; this makes the stat more memorable and shareable. Sticking with our example, this company could frame this stat as such: Americans spend as much time on mobile social networking apps as they do commuting to work. Now that’s a compelling statistic worth sharing.

REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE AT ENTRUSTET

At Entrustet, we needed a way to prove the value of our corporate partner program. In short, the corporate partner program allows sites such as Facebook to keep tabs on which of their users have died and which are still alive. The point we decided we needed to prove was that a significant number of heavy internet users are dying each year. This, in turn, would help us prove the need for our corporate partner program.

So we decided to figure out how many Facebook users will die this year. We researched CDC (Center for Disease Control) data on death rates in the U.S. across age demographics. So after researching, we knew how many people in each age bracket will die each year in the U.S. Then, all we needed was to find out how many Facebook users there are in each of those demographics. This is easy enough to find by using Facebook’s Ad creator. You can break down demographics in very detailed fashion to find out exactly how many Facebook users there are in each category. We found out these numbers quickly, and all that was left to do was to mesh the two sources of statistics on top of each other and we’d be able to estimate the number of people that will die on Facebook this year. We found out that 285,000 U.S. Facebook users will die this year! Wow. That’s a lot. And if you extrapolate that number worldwide, the number goes up to 1.4 million users! That statistic has been used across all our materials and in many press releases and articles about Entrustet. It was instantly a heavily-tweeted stat, as well, thus proving the ‘shareability’ of the statistic.

We got such a good reaction from it, that we decided to create a widget that allows website owners to estimate the number of user deaths they will experience each year. We’ve posted that widget on our corporate partners page. To see and play around with the widget, click here.

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285000 facebook users · compelling stat · compelling statistics · compelling stats · facebook death · how to make a compelling stat