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Our monthly Learning Club sessions are invitations for staff and affiliates to gather, deepen our shared understanding of a topic, spark new ideas, and build alignment. Given the complexity of our work, we use this regular internal learning as an opportunity to experiment and shake up our thinking.
We use numbers as tools to shift practices often in our work, when describing a payout increase, a giving budget or timeline, impact metrics, a grantee or field-wide fiscal need, etc. The issue with explaining concepts of staggering proportions — like exploding wealth inequality — is the incomprehensibly large numbers that create emotional numbing.
When I read that 12.2 million U.S. households own $113 trillion, I might stare off into space and attempt some mental calculus or count on my fingers and toes to unearth further meaning behind these numbers. But when I read that the top 10% of the U.S. wealth ladder owns nearly 70% of U.S. wealth, the force of the injustice hits me like a rock.
What’s the distinction between these two statistics that express similar messages around wealth inequality? The latter offers round numbers that are easily held and interpreted in one’s mind. They are digestible and retainable in our fast-paced, information-dense world.
The power and potential of numbers to persuade inspired our recent Learning Club, in which I facilitated a discussion of creative strategies to effectively deploy data to spur action. Much of the session was inspired by Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr, who argue that math is a language, and therefore, must be translated. They offer examples of how, with a little extra elbow grease, practice, and intention, a writer can turn a bland data point into a memorable, persuasive, and emotionally-stimulating center for their reader.
The authors describe their philosophy as follows, “We believe in numbers not as background, not as decorations, but as central points, with profound stories to tell. We believe in numbers, deeply. We believe in making them count.”
The basic premise of the book is that numbers require us to slow down and add the sizzle. By and large, when proofreading a document, scan for every time a number is used and ensure that it has been translated. Key phrases may include: To put that in perspective… What that means is… By comparison…, etc.
Another strategy that I found useful was using comparisons and analogies to break numbers down into tangible, daily, or personal context. The following is an example from Making Numbers Count of crafting an analogy.
The raw data: The wealthiest 1% of Americans own 31% of the wealth in the country. The top 10% own around 70%. And the bottom half own just 2%.
The analogy: Imagine an apartment building with 10 units on each floor and 100 in total. The richest person owns 31 apartments. Together the 10 wealthiest people in the building own 70 of the apartments. The poorest person shares ownership with everyone who is worth less than $100,000. If that’s you, then you and 49 others would share 2 apartments.
During our Learning Club, we experimented with the ways in which we could express statistics regarding The Great Wealth Transfer (between $83 trillion and $124 trillion will be inherited globally through 2048) in a more approachable manner. As a first step, we decided to simplify the number to an even $100 trillion.
One staffer then asked how tall $100 trillion would be (Would it reach the Moon?). The authors of Making Numbers Count point out that though this would be an impressive height, the reader’s understanding of the real-world impact would not improve. They use an example from one of Ronald Reagan’s speeches, in which the president describes the trillion-dollar national debt as a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high. They underline the fact that in our everyday lives, we don’t equate value with the height of money, and so we come away with no meaningful consequences.
And so we pushed ourselves to compare the worth of $100 trillion in more real terms. We considered comparing this sum to other more familiar benchmarks such as the U.S. GDP ($31.86 trillion at the end of 2026 Q1). However, The Great Wealth Transfer is taking place over the course of over decades — a time frame that doesn’t map as neatly when considering GDP.
We considered how long it would take for an individual to earn trillions of dollars as well as the scale of the impact that amount of money could have on solving global issues, like poverty and houselessness.
Though we didn’t land on one single way to translate this impressive sum in a mere 20 minutes, over the course of our brainstorming, we honed our thinking from more abstract concepts to bring us back to an individual, interpersonal level. The question provoked a discussion of what information a person may need to connect with a numerical figure and see themselves and their giving as part of the bigger picture.
It’s a much-needed endeavor. As we communicate about the levers of extraction and the promising solutions offered in racial, social, economic, and environmental justice, translating numbers well helps people locate themselves, their agency, and their responsibility. Reconnecting numbers with lived experience is essential to the narrative work that radically persuades people to identify entry points and pathways and pursue this work with vigor.Â
Our use of numbers must be driven by what really matters to the human sitting in front of a screen with a piece of writing. When figures allow us to drop down and connect to the emotional tenor of what is being communicated, we cut through the noise and create understanding that is internalized on a somatic level.Â
My dad is fond of this motto from maximalist fashion designer Iris Apfel, “More is more, and less is a bore.” (It’s an expression that has served my father in the ostentatious world of music.) But when it comes to data and knowledge interpretation, we need to return to quality over quantity. Never before have humans had such immense access to statistical information, which is a powerful place to be if we can resist the urge to send an ocean of data with the expectation that the reader is going to enjoy all that salty brine.Â
The effort to ensure comprehension also helps us move past the purposeful diffusion that seeks to abstract and mask oppressive systems. Data can be overgeneralized, cherry picked, misrepresented, or biased to fit an author’s grander purpose. Especially with wealth inequality, scale and framing can make injustice feel abstract or inevitable. The obfuscation is part of an intentional effort to keep movements atomized and inhibit people from recognizing or utilizing the full expression of their power.
One stark example of this is seen through the untapped potential lying in donor advised funds, deaf to the calls for urgent response to time-sensitive crises. An estimated $250 billion that has been designated for charitable purposes is currently held in DAF accounts. To put that figure into perspective, National Alliance to End Homelessness estimated $9.6 billion would provide housing services to all people experiencing sheltered homelessness in the U.S. (The true field-wide need and the urgency of this crisis is further exacerbated by HUD cuts that are pushing hundreds of thousands of Americans back into housing insecurity).
Full activation of resources that we already have on hand is only part of the multi-pronged approach required to solve complex issues and end systems that must generate extraction to exist. But to understand the scale of assets that largely remain frozen leads us into greater recognition of their ability to affect real change. So what can be done to more fully overcome cognitive impediments and empower folks to become well-versed advocates and organizers for such issues? Reconnect to the purpose and power of a statistic. For more tips and reflections on our everyday use of numbers, I recommend Making Numbers Count as a reference guide chock full of clever ways to work with numbers.
