Post-Mortem Part 1 | How Infographics can engage your constituents
You may not know what infographics are by name, but you certainly have seen them before. Infographics are a way of visualizing data to help tell a story. If you've seen a USA Today before, you've seen an infographic in the bottom left hand corner.
If we were at your organizational year-end post-mortem, as we talked about in our earlier post, we'd look for 2012 to be a year where your organization began to tell it's story with images linked to data; not a story limited to a narrative or photographs on your website, newsletter, or direct marketing pieces.
Even when there are not large amounts of data, infographics can tell a story, even in subtle ways. Check out the infographic from Blackbaud's article about online fundraising below.
What I find most notable about the infographic is not what is directly communicated, but what is indirectly communicated: Offline giving is compariable to a bigger, slower, and less nimble cargo/passenger plane. Online giving is a sleek, fast, and nimble fighter jet (that additionally is not drawn to scale). The imagery supports the story that is important to them (increasing role of online fundraising), This, in addition to the data, suggest that there is inherent value of increasing investment in online fundraising.
Clearly, not all organizations have the resources that Blackbaud does to create this type of graphic. However, there are some low-cost tools over at Google that can be deployed right on your organizations site. Most of our readers will not be able to make heads nor tails of the coding required for this, but we bet someone on your digital team will!
Make 2012 a year where you:
1. Identify places in your organzation you track data either about the constituents you serve, or the constituents that support you.
2. Determine the 'story' that the data tells, and the best mechanism (pie chart, bar chart, scatter, graph, map) for telling the story.
3. Work with some design and technical folks to visualize your data for online and print.
If your organization can effectively tell the story, not only with words and pictures but with graphics linked to data, constituents will have greater insight into the organization's impact. Ultimately, this will lead to an increased understanding of your work, a higher level of constituent engagement, and increased support.
