There is an excellent brief article by Teresa Zumwald at Zumwald and Company titled Public speaking tip: Connect the dots when sharing facts and figures. She asked whether you, as a speaker, take the time to connect the dots for your audience. They can’t just rewind and review what you said.
Teresa quoted from a speech by Carl Razo titled Trade Matters, Because People Matter, which won in the Economics category in the 2017 Cicero Speechwriting Awards. (I blogged about them on April 16, 2019 in a post titled What do award winning speeches look like?) It appears on page 31 of THESE VITAL SPEECHES: The Best of the 2017 Cicero Speechwriting Awards. You can download it here. Carl pointed out that:
“….Twenty years ago, trade as a percentage of GDP was 20%. In 2015 this figure was nearly 30%.
Twenty years ago, global FDI was worth US $ 341 billion. In 2015 this figure reached US $ 1.7 TRILLION, with FDI stock tripling as a percentage of global GDP since 1990.
Twenty years ago, there were 123 members of the WTO. Today there are 164.
To put it differently: We have never traded as much as we trade today. Firms have never invested as much abroad as they do today. And we have never been as many actors as there are today in the global trading system.
We are living in an age of unprecedented interdependency, where the destiny of each of us is more than ever tied to the destiny of others.”
Carl was speaking to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva on November 24, 2016. They all knew that the acronym GDP means Gross Domestic Product, and FDI means Foreign Direct Investment. Your audience might not, so you should define each acronym the first time you use it.
There is a web page about the Cicero awards, with a link for downloading the .pdf of the 2022 award winners.
The image was constructed in PowerPoint using blue, gold, green, and red balls from Openclipart.
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