Question: What kinds of data are best suited for raising public awareness? other goals?

At the Appalachian Regional Barnraising, we talked about documentation and data collection, and one of the core questions we had was: what kinds of data are best suited for different end goals? For example, what types of data are best to use if your goal is to convince someone to change their personal behavior, versus something like convincing a researcher to investigate a certain issue? What do you think are best uses for different kinds of data, or the best data for different uses? Please list outcome/data type pairs in the comments so we can start a discussion about data purposes.