I spend a lot of time talking about really serious data with incredibly focused people. I love them and I love my job. But sometimes I need to balance that out with some Lucky Charms. So while eating my bowlful of magically delicious sugar bombs the other day and looking at the back of the cereal box, I dreamed up a way to combine my worlds.

Let’s make our data into a game!

Like some of my other unusual communication strategies, this one is designed to get people guessing, estimating, thinking about the program and its outcomes and impacts. Making it a game gets people engaged. And there isn’t a graph to be seen. While that might make some of us shed a tear, graphs can be intimidating for the non-data nerds of the world (and there are a lot of them out there, believe it or not).

What can you do to gamify your data? Let us know your ideas in the comments.

And if you play the games, here is the answer key!