This news piece caught my eye with working in property, the London Fire Brigade naming and shaming the worst buildings with records of non-urgent lift call outs. So if a lift in a building stops and they are called out to help people out but the individual is still safe inside the lift, then this is classed as non-urgent (only authorised people can access a closed lift with someone in there, whether a lift contractor or the fire brigade).

Although all about lifts, it does raise a few interesting points:

1. Simply releasing quirky stats can raise wider awareness. Doesn’t matter whether they are the results of a survey, a questionnaire, actual facts and figures of a service - they can still be used to inform others. Often they are there anyway within a business and easily accessible, other times you may need to make an effort to establish or at least assimilate them all together. However you get them, they are often there for every business, and whilst a lot can bore you to tears, particularly when you’re not in that business niche, you can come across things like this that intrigue people and therefore make good marketing fodder. What can be hum-drum stats to you can fascinate others.

2. Be ready on the receiving end to defend anything like released about your business, both specifically or your business niche generally. So although this example seems all doom and gloom (bad news making the headlines unfortunately), there is some good news amongst this, with a 54% decrease in call outs since 2008. That’s a dawn impressive reduction that seems to be just brushed over, and likewise can be hidden away in a otherwise remaining glass-half-empty type approach. Plus, in this scenario, it’s not explained why there are these amounts of calls outs; maybe that’s just ‘normal’ when you take the sheer number of lifts in London and just general wear and tear. It’s therefore all about the presentation of the facts, and by using the same ones and maybe some more you could end up with a completely different impression.

3. Think about visually representing the stats. Most people are not geared to love figures, therefore we have to work at closely reading text and digest the true meaning of figures. Hence the presentation of these in other ways opens up other ways of communication and help others appreciate them. So maybe through pie charts, or in this case maybe even nice images of maybe lifts and fire men and then numbers around them.