Fact sheet

Fact sheet - is a one-sided presentation presenting in an accessible way the most important information about a given product, company or event. Very often it uses bulleted information or headline phrases for this purpose. In addition, they can also express information about educational materials, DYI materials or advice on everyday life.

Writing fact sheet

Writing a fact sheet is not an easy task. It is essential that the person presenting the content presents it in a synthetic way. Moreover, most fact sheets contain the following elements:

• Headline
• Summary of most important information in paragraph form
• Bullet point list of supporting facts
• Call to action
• Sources or attributions
• Where to go for more information.

In addition, an effective fact sheet should contain a lot of graphic elements that will allow the recipient to visualize the information that is provided to him on the basis of the fact sheet. These can include images or charts with attractive and useful information, e. g. statistical information.

Structure of fact sheet

Creating a fact sheet boils down to conveying the most important information by placing it on a maximum of one page. In order to maintain the attention of the recipient, it is important that the message is simple and presented in a logical way.

A good structure boils down to a reversed journalistic pyramid, which ranks information from the most important to the less important. In this way, if the reader does not reach the end of the fact sheet, it is highly probable that he has read all the relevant information anyway.

An example of information contained in a fact sheet may be the following: X, Y, and Z Companies Saved $Xmillion Per Year When They Switched to AI For Customer Service. It is then important to use a combination of facts, charts and graphs that will demonstrate the most relevant statistical information about an initiative, business or product. They should be eye-catching, sometimes controversial and sometimes surprising. It is best to present concrete, heavy phenomena by means of associations or by asking open questions. However, the most important thing is that a given fact sheet ends with a call to action, which guarantees that the consumer or recipient will proactively react to the message contained in the fact sheet.

Avoiding mistakes in fact sheet

As mentioned above, the fact sheet should contain a maximum of one page. It is therefore important that the information contained therein is not in small type. This is due to the fact that readers cannot be tired of the presented content. In addition, too much information can blur the general message and make it incomprehensible.

Ultimately, care must always be taken to include sources of information in the specific facts, so as to give them the necessary credibility. However, these facts should remain the focus of attention and therefore it is not so important to always include bold sources. Please note that the information may not be outdated. This may adversely affect the overall reception of the fact sheet.

Footnotes

Fact sheet — recommended articles

Original print — Balanced design — Letter of agreement — Media advisory — Sales kit — Types of websites — Market positioning — Nice classification of goods and services — Secondary packaging

References

• Field L., Sakellariou R. (2017)An Evaluation of Information Consistency in Grid Information Systems,J Grid Computing,p. 127–137
• Luo Ch., Lan Y., Wang Ch., Ma L. (2013)The Effect of Information Consistency and Information Aggregation on eWOM Readers’ Perception of Information Overload",PACIS 2013 Proceedings,p. 4-8
• Toelch U., Bruce M.J., Newson L., Richerson P.J., Reader S.M. (2014)Individual consistency and flexibility in human social information use,Proceedings of the Royal Society B,p. 3-6

Author: Agnieszka Gogola