In this assignment, you’ll create presentation slides showing the results from a recent national poll. This assignment is intentionally designed with loose instructions for practice completing a data visualization task independently from beginning to end.
Your Task
For this assignment, you are taking the role of a public relations specialist working in the communications department of a large U.S. company. Your boss, the associate vice president of communications, gives a presentation to other company leaders each month about recent news and culture trends. Your boss has asked you to find a few interesting facts from recent opinion polls and create slides that she can use in this month’s presentation.
First, choose the company you are pretending to work for. You can choose a company from the Fortune 500 list of most prominent U.S. companies or you can choose any company/institution worldwide with at least 1,000 employees, such as a sports team, retail brand, educational institution, news company, etc.
You will create 3-5 slides with at least three charts:
- You can create your slides in PowerPoint, Google Slides or any other slide-based presentation software.
- You can create your charts directly within the presentation software, or you can use any other software program (such as Illustrator) and add them to the presentation as images. Remember that there is also a PowerPoint download option in Tableau that may be useful.
- You must use enough text and labels to fully explain your charts. This can include text on the slides, on supplementary slides without charts, or typed as speaker notes within the software.
- Your slides should have a consistent, professional visual appearance. Try to use colors and fonts that fit the visual branding styles of your selected company/institution.
Finding Data
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research is a respected polling institution in the United States. Explore the website, which includes documentation for recent polls. Some questions are asked repeatedly, such as questions about presidential approval ratings, and other questions are asked once or annually about topics in the news.
Identify a topic that you think would be interesting for your boss to include in the presentation, and think about what type of charts would quickly explain that information effectively. Each of the three charts should include at least several data points, not just a single factoid.
You do not need to present your slides, since the idea is that you would send them to your boss to use. However, it’s a good idea to practice presenting them to friend to check that your information and design choices make sense to someone who is not familiar with the information.
Written Questions
Answer the following questions in 1-2 sentences each:
1. What company/institution did you choose, and why?
2. How did you decide which information to visualize for this assignment?
3. How did you decide which software tools to use for creating your charts and slides?
4. What is something you felt uncertain about as you created your slides? This could be about the meaning of the data, chart types, placement of labels, word choice, etc.
Submitting Your Work
Complete your assignment by submitting the following materials to Canvas:
- File with saved or exported slides
- Word document with written responses