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Talking numbers to a village hall
The rehearsal Carmen and Íñigo put Alex through reflects a real difference between presenting to a client and presenting to a community. A council technician or a regional official expects tables, sources and percentages, and the written report gives them those. A village assembly is another audience entirely. In a municipality of forty people the audience includes the very residents the figures describe: the person who knows exactly how many neighbors died last year, the family whose house is one of the empty ones, the farmer who was here before the statistics started. Precision that sounds clinical, or a single wrong number, can lose the room. Approximations that cannot be contradicted, en torno a, unos, cuatro de cada diez, protect the presenter and respect the audience's knowledge at the same time. Spanish public speech also has a strong taste for contrast and for the short memorable line. Carmen's instruction, keep the one striking contrast and do not bury it, and Íñigo's cuanto más confía el dueño, menos tiempo pasa la casa vacía, are both about producing the sentence people repeat in the bar afterward. That sentence matters more than the slides, which in a village hall may be projected onto a wall, or not at all. And honesty about money is not optional. In small places, news travels fast and suspicion of outside consultants runs deep, often for good reasons. Saying plainly that twenty thousand euros repairs three or four houses, and then explaining why three or four houses matter, is far more persuasive than inflating the promise. Íñigo's last piece of advice, write down what you do not know and answer next week, is the practical rule of every good public meeting.