There’s a task I run in a workshop I run where we de-construct a news package that tells its own lesson.
An environmental campaiigner talks about how she went scuba diving in the 1950s off the coast of Bali and the sea was crystal clear. Now? It’s full of rubbish.
So far so good, but she pulls out two facts to illustrate what she is doing to the planet. We dump 12 million tonnes of plastic into the sea, she opens. That’s the equivalent of a truckful of waste every minute, she adds.
What stat is most powerful?, I ask.
It’s always the truck a minute.
Why? Because it’s more relatable. We can see the picture of the truck dumping rubbish into the sea and if you were brought up correctly we are slightly morally offended.
There is something uniquely effective about making something relatable.
I was reminded about this walking to work this morning listening to the Rest is Entertainment podcast. Apparently, the new Grand Theft Auto game has cost £2 billion to develop. That’s more expensive than the Grand Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai.
Now, working in and around the public sector not everything can be compared to a Middle Eastern property development.
So what can?
An Olympic-sized swimming pool is 2,500 square metres.
A football pitch is 90 metres long and at least 45 metres wide.
The Royal Albert Hall is 99,000 square metres of volume.
You can park 25,000 double-deckers in Wembley Stadium.
But real stats can also paint a picture.
More than 120,000 pints of lager were sold at Glastonbury 2025.
At Wimbledon, 1.9 million strawberries are eaten every year.
To quote Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, one death is a tragedy and a million a statistic.
What’s your favourite comparison stat?
I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.
Creative commons credit: Wembley stadium: the old stadium from the stands by Christopher Hilton, CC BY-SA 2.0.