Welcome and thank you for standing by. I will turn the call over to Ms. Jocelyn Bauer. Hello and welcome to another talking operations webinar hosted by the National Transportation Operations Coalition. The title of today's webinar is performance journalism, improving your ability to build operations program support. I'll be giving a brief introduction to the Web conference environment. Darren Buck will serve as the moderator for today's seminar. The seminar will last approximately an hour and a half the 60 minute allocated for the presenters in the final 30 minutes for audience questions. Our seminar is being recorded. During the presentation, if you think of a question you can type it into the smaller text box and a chat area on the left side of your screen. Indicate your question is directed towards. They sure -- be sure you send your question to everyone. The presenters will be unable to answer your questions during the presentation that we will use some of the questions taken to the chat box for the question-and-answer session on the last part of the seminar. A file containing the audiovisual part of the seminar will be posted to the In talk website within the next week. I will type the web address into the chat box for you shortly. Attendees will be notified that the ability -- availability of the seminar by him. We encourage you during others in your office were not able to attend this seminar to access the recording on my. The presentation and related papers are available for download in the file download box you can see on your screen. To download a file click with your mouse in the name of the file you like to download and click the button at the bottom of the download box that says saved to my computer. At this time I like to introduce Darren Buck the moderator. He is the -- federal highway offers of operations. Activities of the national transportation coalition. Prior to joining federal highway in 2008, Darren worked in similar roles in the community and a small federal program. Creating jobs for people with disabilities. Darrenn Received an MBA from the University of Maryland in 2005 is currently studying transportation planning at the Virginia technical masters of urban and regional planning program great Daryn I will turn things over to who will start us off. Thank you very much Jocelyn . Today we are pleased to present information on a concept called performance journalism. It can used -- it can be used to garner support from the operations program from the public and decision-makers. Operation performance measures enable agencies to apply operational strategies to their systems. Report performance to the public and assist in justifying funding for operations activities by proving success. People want demonstrable results. Rather reporting on congestion trends are clear as times, providing understandable performance information to the public and are decision-makers. These are key components to having a successful operations Parker. -- program. Kenneth Our speakers today are who you associate with Cambridge systematics from Georgia. He has 35 years of experience in traffic engineering, operations and transportation planning. He has managed a wide range of products including GMC operations, data archiving and IDS planning. He has a bachelors and Masters degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech. The Southern's district director on IDT international worker 2006 to 2008 and the IDS Georgia state chapters representative to ideas America. Also we have Susan Sharpe who is president of sharpening company in Maryland. She has been in her profession of graphic design, copywriting and communication strategy for over 35 years as well. Shall of the advertising profession and started her own firm in 1982 as of the early 90s has been focusing on serving the public transportation sector. Her firm's clients include federal state him old -- local governments providing highway transit and air services from 2000 region 2005 three she took a leave of absence to work for the Washington Metro. She received her bachelor's degree from AU, American University and serves as corporate relations chair for the Washington DC chapter of WTF. First up, a brief introduction, my colleague Rich Taylor who is a transportation specialist there in FHWA office of operation, Richard manages the operations performance measures program among other duties. Prior to joining FHWA , rich word for ideas America, Wilbur Smith Associates in with a return scientist for the Virginia Department of transportation. He holds a Masters of city planning, masters planning with a certificate and a start preservation and a Masters of science in civil engineering degree is often the University of Virginia. I will hand over to Jocelyn . Thank you Daryn. good morning or afternoon everybody. I would like to welcome you to the webinar performance journalism. I'll give you a brief introduction to the topic where we are presenting this particular subject today. What is this webinar about? It is about the operation story, getting it out to the public. How are you going to do that? We have a lot of data that we have installed using our IDS sensors, and potentially buying from the private sector nowadays. And usually who want to use that data to provide me performance measures to see how you're doing. The reason we're here today is to tell the story to be proactive. Performance journalism is about being proactive and not reactive. It is time for the operations community to set the story, set the stage not just react to incidents or things that come along. It requires a commitment and believe in the work that your agency is doing. And you have to remember, like I said before, operations is in new kid on the block. When he took splinter cells to the public and clear relatable terms and we can use our traffic data and other related data and develop performance measures from and use that information to tell a good story about operations. I am the program manager for the operations performance measurement program here at federal highway. We are trying to assist the state and local agencies to develop their own performance measures program. Performance journalism is a key component of a healthy and thriving program. We're focusing on helping agencies learn how to develop their data into usable performance measures. That can be used to support operating the system. Basically, to the operational strategies, and assessing the strategies and their success or maybe they're not being successful. We also want to use performance measures to support funding decisions. If we have a Freeway service patrol, perchance, and the legislature wants to cut funding for the program. Well, gosh darn it, we need to show them how much delay we are saving by having a Freeway patrol out there. And maybe that is a good reason for them to continue funding it. Finally, we need to open an ongoing dialogue with the public and decision-makers to reporting our performance and accountability. Join the things that legislature is paying for, they are getting good results on. That is where performance journalism comes into play. I would tell you just what we are going to hear about this webinar today. We are going to give examples of how to discuss the operation story with the public and decision-makers. We will provide examples of how to tell a story versus providing just that. Will provide examples of how to graphically tell a story and we are leaving ample time for questions and comments and providing an opportunity for you to provide your ideas on what you think federal highways could do to help you with your operations performance measurement program. We do want to acknowledge the work that the Washington State Department of Transportation has done in the area of performance journalism. As we're using it in this webinar, we coin a phrase. We listen here -- were listed here on the screen, they appear the paper written by James Frey a prominent Washington state DOT. You can find on the website. Last include that file. In our file share pod on the lower left side of your screen. You can click on that. Press save to my computer button and it will save a copy to your computer and you can read the excellent documentary We also included Jocelyn mentioned , a white paper that was developed by Kenny and Susan Sharpe. On this topic, it is a written account of what you'll be hearing today during the webinar. Feel free to say that I share that with your colleagues as well. Here is my contact information if you have any questions after the webinar or ideas. Feel free to contact me. Our operations performance website on the federal highway website is listed there. At this point I like to introduce our speakers. Kenny Warke And Susan Sharpe from sharpening company. They degrade -- sharpening company. Hello it is a pleasure to be here today to talk to you. Micah background -- my background is the marketing world. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the customer is going to be receiving information. I want to start off today talking about, setting the stage for performance journalism. Why it matters to you. But start off with, what is the general public elected appointed officials understood the value of your program? Were that but you? What is the head of your department are your organization understood? Would it make a difference for you and how much funding he received and a what you're able to do to address traffic concerns in your area? That is what we mean by improving program support. Will you would certainly know that you had more program support is that if you had more funding for your project. That sounds good doesn't it? That is what performance journalism can do for you. Let's find out how. Performance journalism has three components to it. It's quantitative performance reporting, it's storytelling, and it's good graphics. Or, to put it in performance journalism terms, it's data, story, and graphics. Making a lightbulb go off of somebody else's brain. Now I see how the stuff can help us. We are going to look at these components more closely. It starts with the data. It is crucial to building credibility that your fax be accurate and appropriate. Data integrity is the cornerstone of performance measurement. An essential, absolutely essential to performance journalism. It is also important to determine whether the data up lies to the specific discussion. For example, a discussion of crowded highways, the site non-highway increases along with those for highway, brings extraneous information in. Am I just distort the context. Depending on the story that you are telling, 90 different data types and levels of data detail that are needed. I'm going to turn over to Kenny Vorhees who is the data guy. Thank you Susan. Good afternoon everyone. As Susan said, and Rich Taylor before said, "he our quality data is key to this whole performance journalism. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about collecting, analyzing and reporting information that is based on performance data. You see here, a list of data that you might find helpful. In performance journalism. There are the usual things like volume, speech, travel times, but there are other areas where we are being able to collect in recent times, data on incidents, weather, customer satisfaction is helpful, and agency operations activities data. Many times, transit operations data is also helpful. Before continuing developing your story, you should identify the data that is relevant to your situation and available to determine if you need more data. That data cannot be available in a reasonable time or at a reasonable cost, then you may need the modifier to your storyline. As a note, this list is very similar to the data performance measures that were identified in the entire performance measure study. A couple of years ago. That study was conducted by the University of Maryland's Center for advanced transportation technology. You can go to that link shown at the bottom. For more information and definitions of some of these performance measures. You want to start by reviewing your available data and determining if more data is needed. You want to check to see if the data quality is good. The information in the data is accurate. You want to see if the data is current. Not to look at things and if any data is several years old, it should be looked at as being suspect. You want to make sure it is still relevant to your current situation. Souza mentioned before, you don't want -- Souza mentioned before, you want to use non-highway data when talking about a highly situation. Does the data you have available relate to the situation you are trying to tell the story about? Finally, you want to make sure that special circumstances may skew the data. For example, say a road segment was under construction for a year. During which the hand. You're looking at. The data is going to be slower than normal and may not be representative of the situation. So let's take a look at an example. Say your agency would like to show the benefits of your freeway service program. The first thing you need to do is define a message that you want to tell the story about. So the message, we came up with is a service patrol program saves motorist time by reducing the time lanes are blocked. So you look at what data is available and defined there is information on the number of incidents, the incident type, the number of incidents that have a lame blocking involved -- Lena blocking about an incident duration our timeline with his components. Take a look at that data. You see that what is really relevant here is incident duration. This message, it is important for decision makers and the public, but they see the incident timeline. Also, it may be important to define what the scale of the number of incidents are. The number of incidents with blocked lanes may be useful. This is how I often see how this type of data is presented. This is borrowed from my friends down the street here in Georgia DOT. Of course they were not trying to answer our situation with the benefits of their program. They are showing trend lines. But we often don't get past this point. In this diagram, the Green line shows the overall incident of duration. For our purposes, the other data is not that relevant and it may dilute your message. How would we suggest that you present this message? Using this type of data, this is what you can come up with. And the situation here, in 2004, it is actually before data. The service patrol program started in 2005, that had a full year of data at that time. You see the data collected between 2006 and 2009. The message here can be adding service patrol's reduced lock is time by 75% in four years. To continue to talk about performance journalism, I am going to turn it back over to Susan. Thank you Kenny. That is a great presentation on the data. Here's the thing. Data is fax. Most people don't retain tax. Most people really aren't moved by facts an often as I'm sure y'all have experience, they don't even make their decisions based on facts. They are moved based on stories. Humans are storytellers species. We went to stories because they capture our imagination they allow us to put ourselves in a situation. So the most compelling way of sharing information is through stories. What is at the heart of a story? Why? Why does it happen? Why does it matter? Why should I care? The backs Mike tells the who, what, when and where but it is the stories that tell us why. The -- the backs Mike Ellis who what when and where. But the stories tell us why. Another way of looking at why it is to see that it provides a context for the data that you are giving. When you leave these elements and, you have a story. So let's look at an example. When you give backs out of context -- without a context, it does not mean that much to an audience. I ran across this all the time. I'm going to guess that one or two of you and his group are guilty of this. You get somebody giving you a statistic like last year 1500 more vehicles were added. In my mind, and in the mind of your audience often, they are going is that good? Is it bad? Was a lot? Was it a little? When you have the context to it, that was more than twice the number over the last 10 years. Oh. Now I get it. Now I can see why it is so crowded on the freeway. The facts by themselves, they just don't connect with your audience and the same kind of way. It's context determines the data into information that helps to tell the story. Let's look at another example. Here we have vehicular traffic increased by 3% last year. Again, is that good? Is it bad? Do I care? Does it matter? In order to have understanding, and take the backs of build into a story, now we explained that this has increased 3% and no new highway lanes have been built. This has forced more and more drivers onto already crowded roads. You can see how we have taken as fact and built it into a story that has a compelling purpose to it. So, let's look at how we take it back and build it into a story and use graphics to enhance the understanding. Here is a fact. Today we are borrowing heavily from the Georgia Department of Transportation. The Georgia Department of Transportation will activate five more ramp meters every 19th and 20th. This came from a press release that they put out. This was the back. -- this was the back. If we add the wide to accommodate the cows were compelling. It is to improve the flow of traffic between Maori Boulevard in Colombia dry. If I commute along a section of road, I care. It immediately identifies the spot and tells me why they are putting the ramp meters in. Here's the thing, there are a lot of people reading this and they don't know what a ramp meter is. You can use graphics to support the story that you are telling. Despite putting in a picture of the ramp meter. Maybe some people in your audience are saying what is a funny thing sitting by the side of the road. Now I know. That is what a ramp meter is. You can see where we have taken a fact. We have added the wide to it you and we have depicted graphically so people can understand it very quickly and easily. You want to make sure your graphics are relevant. Here is the exact same information presented with a different graphic. What is the matter here? This image has nothing? As a graphic designer, this is my bugaboo because I see this all the time. Showing traffic and particularly a traffic jam does not demonstrate the value of a ramp meter. In fact, it could have a negative effect because it is showing the opposite of what it is that the ramp meter is to achieve. It is really just a filler picture. It is distracting and not informative. I know that we often feel compelled to fill the space with something. It is really better to have no graphic and to have a graphic that can be misinterpreted. You also want to make sure that your graphics are easy to understand. This image is way too complicated for a PowerPoint presentation. It is often not even an American road which some people might find distracting. It definitely does not contribute to understanding. Endeavor's attention. Anybody looking at this is going to say, am I supposed to be reading all of that copy? They call outs are too small to pick up quickly and even if you are going to use this in a printed document, like a report, you have to think long and hard about your audience before adding a graphic like this. Showing how ramp meters work he enters the engineers but it may not forward your cause. Unless you are presenting to engineers. The showing why they were, on the other hand, might be very useful. After all, what you are asserting is that by stopping traffic, you are improving traffic. That is counterintuitive for many people. What you want to do, I anticipate, the unanswered question in the audience's mind. That helps you remove a distraction and enables the audience to be more receptive to what you have to say. Let's talk a little bit more about using graphics. I mean images, charts, graphs, anything visual that you add to your report or presentation. Graphics are a great way to quickly show relationships. The text on the left is very dense with information. This same information is printed on the right-hand side. Very quickly, shown to these pie charts and using a heading that reinforces the information. That allows the audience to quickly grasp what you're talking about. It enables you to get the concrete data understood that present your audiences had space where they are processing capacity for them to comprehend your story. You don't people so distracted by trying to follow the data that they can't follow the story. Graphics can quickly convey a lot of information. For example, this is to convey the intricacies of a complex physical infrastructure. That can be difficult to convey in words alone which is what you see on the left-hand side. The graphic might be used to quickly show that there is not enough space for very large plans at this -- planes at the airport. Perhaps the discussion had been about runways. This shows the runway capacity is not the whole story. Anytime you have a number of variables to describe a graphic can simplify and make it much easier for people to understand. Here you have graphic guidelines in addition to what I have just said. Make sure to remove extraneous attributes. User chart title to tell the story. -- user chart title to tell the story. Maybe cannot afford to pay someone to generate new graphics for you all the time. Let's go step by step to improving some of the most common graphs that you use in your reports. Those are generated from Excel. Here is your typical graph generated by Excel. I am sure you have seen many many many of these. The first thing that we are going to do is start removing the extraneous distracting elements. With startup by taking out the shading, -- let's start out with taking out the shading. Let's remove the 3-D perspective on the bars. Let's talk about 3-D for a minute. People often claim that they jazz up the presentation. You have to be careful because using dimensionality can distort data. To make it much more difficult to read. In fact, I find it hard to make a case for 3-D so let's remove that. Continuing to clear up the graphic, we're going to take out the grid line. Along with the tick marks. Notice that you can see the bars of the graph much more clearly. After all, that is what we are trying to show here. So now. Let's take out the third data set. This graph does not reference the average figure so it is not needed. Similarly, just because the data that you have included in something, maybe you don't need and what you are presenting. Continuing to purge ourselves of extraneous elements, now we are going to remove the vertical axis line along with the need to have to crane your neck in order to read the legend that is running up the side. This is another thing. If you need to have the type going every which way, it makes it easier for the reader or the viewer. If we take the legend out, and we replace it -- we place the labels on the bar, we are making it easier to quickly understand the information. The legend is not needed for so few bars. We can get rid of that too. And label the bars themselves. As we do with these figures, let's make all the other identifiers more legible. Now our bars are nice and clean. Easily and quickly grabbed. Let's look at the chart titles. The figure numbers are referenced. Not an important piece of information. It can be downsized. What about the title? It is not telling us much of anything. Let's rewrite the title. Now by saying this, we have made it telescope until the story right there in the headline. It was reduced 35% between two -- 2005 and 2000 and. Once more, here is a before and here in the after. I will give you a minute to be stunned by the amazing difference it made on there. To sum up on the graphics, make sure they are relevant and they enhance your understanding of your story. Remove extraneous attributes. Tram, purge, cleanup thing up as much as you possibly can and always take advantage of using the chart of the graphic title to telescope and tell the story. One of the things we learned in design school is when people have a report, we will read the headline, they will read the captions and that is all. We will look at the pictures. Counting on people to read a lot of text to get the message is not a safe assumption. Also, you don't ever want to put anything into a slide or report the have to make excuses for. So if you have data that is not exactly the right data, don't use it. You don't want to have to excuses -- make excuses are explain to people why it is there. Now, let's look at putting it all together. Most of us start out thinking about what we want to say. Don't we? We are all, how am I going to write my presentation?, going to put it together? What am I going to tell them? Etc. etc. Successful communicators, on the other hand, think about what the audience wants to know. Brilliant communication is about what the other person receives as it is about what we say. That means, that you talk about things in the audiences terms. As you collect the appropriate data, write your narrative and develop your graphics. The most important thing to remember is what matters to the audience now and what is going to be different for them after hearing your presentation or reading your report. When you know these two things, you have the outline for the best possible story. The one where the audience is the hero. The following points will help you sell anyone, DOT executive management, general public, are elected or appointed officials only benefits you have identified. Verse, think strategically. Before focusing -- first, think strategically. Before focusing on what data to collect, graphics to use, using PowerPoint are pressure, spent time thinking about what to present. What is the big picture? Why communicate about performance? What is the most important point to get across? Such thinking will greatly help you develop your story. Secondly, tie your points to existing conversations. Learning and influencing do not take place in a vacuum. The audience that is receiving your information is not an empty receptacle. Waiting to be filled with the information you are providing. People have preconceived notions, they are being bombarded with information at all hours of the day. And they are often just trying to manage all. To be heard, it is vital to speak it to someone's listening. For example, you know that ramp meters improve freeway speed by as much as 25%. However, perhaps a conversation that DOT executive management is having is about budget cuts and how to bring more service out of existing infrastructure. Your presentation might be better received if it reinforces the value of ramp metering. Perhaps by showing how ramp metering can postpone or eliminate the need to add capacity. By the way, here I am showing presentations. These principles apply equally whether you're writing a report are communicating in any other way. Again constantly think what is on the audience's mind and how can you tie your discussion to it?