Infographic illustrates how to post your way to Facebook success

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, Web publishers, marketers.

Pagemodo recently published a beautiful infographic that covers the basics of how content functions on Facebook.

And although your page might differ (always measure!), they’ve outlined some pretty useful places to start if you don’t know what works for your audience:

• Posts made on Facebook between 8 pm and 7 am get a 14% higher interaction rate.
• Caption this photo posts on Facebook get 5.5 times more comments.
• Posts with calls to action get 45% higher interaction on Facebook.
• Positive content on Facebook gets more likes, while negative posts draw more comments.

Post your way to Facebook success

Here’s the infographic on how to tailor your Facebook updates:

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How nonprofits can use infographics to demonstrate supporters’ impact

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, Web publishers, bloggers, social media managers, individuals.

People support your organization for one reason: They view your organization as the agent of change they seek.

If they had the resources, they’d make the changes they desire by themselves. But they don’t, which is why you’re in their lives.

So when you tell the story of your cause, you need to show how supporters ultimately create the outcomes.

Nonprofit storytelling with infographics

One powerful way to do this is with a set of infographics like the Best Friends Animal Society created.

What’s really great about this infographic is that it’s broken down into five separate infographics, which makes the information even more digestible.

Five tips for creating powerful infographics

Best Friends Animal Society does a number of things right with their infographic. Here are a few:

1. Keep it simple. The information should be instantly understood through pictures and words.
2. Make it beautiful. No one wants to share an infographic that’s ugly. Make sure you spend the money and hire a graphic artist who can create a beautiful infographic. (Here are 20 tools to create infographics, including our favorite, Canva.)
3. Make it easily shareable. Users should be able to share your infographic with one mouse click on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. If you use WordPress for your website, you’ll find a number of plug-ins that will add a sharing feature to images.
4. Put it everywhere. Make sure you post your infographic on your Facebook page, your Pinterest board, and even Instagram. This allows people who call these places their home to easily see it.
5. Promote it. Just because you build it doesn’t mean people will come. You need to have a marketing communications plan that uses your biggest assets, like your email list, to promotes the infographic.

Have you seen an effective infographic about a cause? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post Five tips to create powerful infographics appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Cause organizations, NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, political reformers, educators, journalists, general public.

Over the past three years, as regular readers know, Socialbrite has put together dozens of guides and compilations of resources and tools for social change advocates. See the bottom of this article for a few, and our Sharing Center is all about social tools for social change.

To celebrate Internet at Liberty, a conference on protecting protecting freedom of expression on the Internet that Google is organizing in Washington, D.C., this week — and where Socialbrite is running the social media workshops — we’re launching a new section today:

The Social Advocacy Toolkit features new and updated informational guides, tool roundups and resources for global activists, social good advocates, political reformers, NGOs and anyone looking to use online tools for social change. It includes tactics for effective campaigns, guides to the best monitoring and metrics tools (many of them free), lists of enabling platforms and organizations and other resources to help galvanize your campaign.

Below is a new guide that we’ve put together to help social change activists with their advocacy efforts, which we’re adding to the toolkit. Check out the Social Advocacy Toolkit for much more.

10 tools for activists & social change advocates

Asana: A leap ahead for productive teamwork

1Asana is a work-collaboration software suite that came out of beta in April 2012. “We built this company to change the world,” said founder Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook. Asana offers a simple, word processor-like interface to give people working together on a task a central place to discuss the project, share files and keep track of to-dos in real time. It’s free for teams of fewer than 30 users.

Alternatives: Yammer, Microsoft Sharepoint (for larger enterprises) and see our Collaboration roundup

PopVox: Advocate your cause in Congress

2You might remember our recent article on PopVox, an online service that individuals and grassroots organizations can use to lobby members of Congress on behalf of a cause. CEO Marci Harris founded the nonpartisan service based on her knowledge of how Congressional staffers interact with the public. For a cause to be effective, it has to be made concrete on behalf of or against a specific bill. PopVox helps you do that.

Geo-bombing with Google Earth

3I was blown away when I saw Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org (The Core) link video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth. Now, as you fly over the Tunisian presidential palace using a Google Earth KML file, you will see it covered with videos about human rights abuses that strongman Ben Ali tried to prevent Tunisian citizens from watching by blocking YouTube and DailyMotion. Visit earth.google.com/outreach for more examples. We’d like to see more organizations to take up “geo-bombing.”

Mapping tools: Show, don’t tell

4Any campaign or cause organizations with tech talent should consider following the steps of charity: water, which does a remarkable job of documenting their clean-water projects for individual donors through the use of Google Maps. Paull Young, their director of digital engagement, told me: “We’ve been marking all our water projects with GPS since we were founded in 2006. We had a developer crank for a few weeks late last year to create this new mapping solution. It’s not incredibly technically difficult, the hardest part is getting data from the field. You might also want to check out our Dollars to Projects reporting for even more in-depth personalized mapping.” Also doing a good job with Google Maps: A Child’s Right.

Note: Google began charging for its previously free Google Maps API last year, leading to an exodus to the open source OpenStreetMap, which we expect will continue to get better and better.

Tableau Public: Infographics made simple

5You may have noticed the Infographics Everywhere trend that’s sweeping the Web, probably spurred by the fact that infographics has been democratized — you no longer need to be a graphics guru to make a swift-looking graphic. Why not boil down your cause or campaign to a couple of key infographics? The tool we like best is Tableau Public, because it’s good and it’s free. For visualizations, Wordle and Many Eyes create great-looking word clouds. But before you plunge in, see this fantastic set of Data Visualization and Infographics Resources from Smashing Magazine — and make sure what you create isn’t info porn.

Statf.ly: Create a metrics dashboard

6What’s a campaign without a metrics dashboard, to tell you with data-driven evidence what’s resonating with your community — and what’s falling flat? There are a few newcomers to consider: Statf.ly (we like the 30-day free trial and $19/month pricetag), Sparkwi.se and Metricly. It’s worth the investment. See which one works for you and gives your campaign traction and tweak your campaign on the fly.

Dropbox: Life in the cloud is sweet

7I’ll be straight up: My hands-down favorite productivity and collaboration tool of the decade so far has been Dropbox. What was life like before the cloud? Oh, yeah, it was a pain to get stuff done. Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs and videos anywhere with an Internet connection — and share them easily. Any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Never email yourself a file again! Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage space for free, plus 500MB more if you refer a friend who signs up. It can get pricey when moving up to Dropbox for Teams, so see what your budget allows.

CitizenTube: Get visibility for your cause videos

8CitizenTube is YouTube’s News and Politics Blog. You’ll find important breaking news videos from citizens and other newsworthy videos from news organizations, activists and politicians. You are creating your own media, right? Why not get it seen by YouTube’s legion of viewers? See a different version of it here, and follow @CitizenTube on Twitter.

Buffer: Cross-posting nirvana

9If you’re running a cause campaign, there aren’t enough hours in the day, right? So think productivity. Shonali Burke, who recently left Socialbrite, told me: “Buffer is killer. It lets you send updates to Facebook, Twitter, etc. straight from your Google Reader or a browser. You can also post them directly from Buffer. Spread them out over the day. I’m just loving it and using HootSuite less. I tend to do most of my reading via Reader, and it’s super easy to star the posts that interest me, then sort by starred items, and then add to Buffer.” The basic version is free, for up to 10 posts at a time; for heavy users, you can get the paid version.

GroupMe: Keep in touch with your team members

10If you’re at an event — a conference, a street protest, a peaceful march — with other team members, you know how difficult it it to stay in touch and to coordinate plans. Socialbrite recently gave GroupMe a test run and came away impressed. GroupMe is a free group messaging app. I like it because it’s both instant and asyncronous — that is, your teammates will see your updates instantly or when they next check their mobile devices. Call up GroupMe and invite others in your posse to join your private group. Type your update and send it to the group, as you would an SMS message, and they’ll see it in a chat thread. One of GroupMe’s key features is that it’s cross-platform: You don’t miss a beat whether you have an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or another kind of smartphone. In addition to the ability to share messages, photos and locations like the other apps, GroupMe also allows old-fashioned conference calls between group members.

Alternative: Facebook Messenger

Other tools worth a shoutout

The tools above aren’t the only ones that should be in your advocacy arsenal. Consider some of these as well:

• See our writeup on Digital Democracy and its Handheld Human Rights mobile platform for human rights in Burma/Myanmar.

• GeoChat, from InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), is a collaboration tool that allows anyone to chat, report and get alerts on their cellphone and to map data on Google Earth, Google Maps or Virtual Earth. It uses SMS, email, and Twitter.

• Ushahidi and Frontline SMS are must-have mobile tools for anyone working with remote communities or in disaster relief areas. And they have broader uses as well.

• Join.me is a cross-platform screen sharing app that lets you give control of your computer screen to someone else.

• Shortstack, says my partner John Haydon, “is my number one choice for creating amazing Facebook Page custom tabs. You can create photo contents, reveal tabs, photo galleries and more. Check out this example of what you can create with Shortstack.” It costs $15 a month to start.

• NodeXL is a tool for finding connections between people or organizations. Mostly for geeks as it’s a bit daunting.

• If This, Then That is another interesting tool I just discovered. It helps you create certain actions when a task is triggered, like “send me a text message when my organization is mentioned on Facebook.”

• Jing from TechSmith, Screenr and Screenflow for Mac are three of the best tools for creating screencasts.

Guides for social change advocates

Here are some of Socialbrite’s other guides for social change:

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools (JD Lasica)
• 12 open source tools you should be using (Kim Bale)
• 12 awesome platforms for social good (Katrina Heppler)
• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change (Barbara K. Iverson)
• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist (Dan Pacheco)
• A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change (Allyson Kapin)
• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools (Nathan Freitas)
• 6 productivity tools for social change (Katrina Heppler)
• Complete guide to creating a video project (Tim Davies)

Related

• Making media: Tools & resources for nonprofits and social change organizations (Socialbrite)
• 10 top collaboration tools for your organization
• The Socialbrite Sharing Center
• Directory of cause organizations (Socialbrite)

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Nonprofits: Move your mission forward by following these examples

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, government agencies, universities, businesses, research institutions.

Guest post by Kurt Voelker
CTO, Forum One

Data is the new black. These days everyone is releasing it, visualizing it, aggregating it, and mashing it up. And for good reason. Data is so much more than a stack of numbers or a server filled with client outputs. It can justify the work that your organization is doing, help others understand why it is critical, and offer exciting new ways to motivate others to help solve the problems your organization is working on.

And chances are your nonprofit, government agency, foundation, or research institution has gobs of it just sitting around. It’s locked in white papers, policy briefs, and fact sheets. It’s hidden away in project output reports and research Excel files.

Given the attention that data gets from the media, influencers, and Capitol Hill, we believe that every communications department is obligated to look closer at their data and how they are using it – and consider how you should be tapping into it to get work done toward your organizations goals.

One effective way to transform your data from an afterthought into a powerful communications product is through visualizations that help tell your story.

Here are 6 ways to tell your stories with data that you can apply to your own web and communications work:

Speak with numbers

1Sometimes it’s best to just let the numbers speak for themselves. Numbers are a universal language. You can make a big impression of site visitors just by presenting them clearly and in context with your Web content.

charity: water, an organization that raises money to build wells in Africa has learned the lesson. Look how elegantly they tell the story of the need for fresh drinking water and the difference their prorgrams are making.

Reveal change

2Many of the stories we’d like our site visitors to understand are centered on revealing the truth behind a situation. The truth can become obvious when you reveal the change in data in a visual way. By simply removing everthing except the changing data, your data will suddenly reveal the compelling story you are looking to spread – whether you are revealing conditions that are worsening, attitudes that are changing or the improvements you organization is making.

My favorite example of this technique is the Descry Project’s Obesity Epidemic visualization. By using the simple metaphor of T-shirt size to represent a US state’s obesity rate, and making them “grow” over a two decade period, we can quickly see how America’s waistline has ballooned in since 1987.

Focus the story

3We touched on this principle above. If you really want users to understand the story your data tells, you need to remove everything except the story. Focus their attention, and they’ll get it. Everything else is just noise.

In this sample infographic from David McCandles, he was inspired by Clay Shirky’s claim that the world has an enormous “cognitive surplus” – untapped hours that we could be using our brains, but simply are not. David zeroed in on two relevant data points to tell the story: the number of hours Americans spend watching TV in a year, and the total combined man hours needed to create all of Wikipedia.

Provide context

4Users need a grounding point to understand your data. They need something to put into a perspective that they relate to intuitively. When telling your story with data, look outside your own data set to find other data that makes your story more accessible and puts it in context.

Check out another of David McCandless’s beauties, above. Again, David uses the simple comparitive size of blocks to put “a billion dollars” into context.

Let users explore, discover and control

5Moving beyond infographics into interactive tools that let the users take control of the data themselves is another powerful way to reveal your story through data. The best interactive data tools make it simple for users to jump into the data:

• They don’t just start with a blank canvas asking users to select mysterious indicators, metrics or variables.
• They do get the user started with a pre-selected set of data that already tell a story.
• They don’t take an “everything and kitchen sink” approach but rather provide tools enabling users to manipulate the data.
• They understand the most common way a user would like to approach the data and provide one or two data-manipulating tools that help them on their way.

Let’s look at another example of this in practice. CUP is a New York City based organization that educates and informs the public, educators and policy makers to help them make smarter urban growth decisions. Their Envisioning Development project helps people understand “What is affordable housing” in New York City. This map-based interactive data visualization makes it simple to select a neighborhood and quickly see the neighborhood’s income distribution and the real cost of hosing in that ‘hood, and then reveals the gaps.

Tell your story, literally!

6Sometimes the best way to explain your data is to do just that – explain it. Using video explanations of even simple charts and graphs can help site visitors quickly get the big picture – and arms them with an understanding of the data that lets them explore and discover more confidently on their own.

Hans Rosling, the Dutch economist famous for his TED Talk’s that reveal the insight we can gain from data, has popularized the approach. And even better, through his collaboration with Google, he’s made his data visualization software available to everyone through GapMinder.com.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start transforming your organization’s locked-up data into powerful communication tools.

Have you tried any of these techniques, or others, using data? Please share in the comments below.

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Figures, properly used, can help tell your organization’s story

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, Web designers, Web publishers, brands, educators.

Infographics are multiplying like rabbits. I run across them everywhere, and about all types of subjects from the power of social fundraising to what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Some are great, some not so great. The abundance of data we now have to process is fueling the trends toward content curation, data consolidation tools and information visualization.

As Beth Kanter remarked on a public Google Plus thread about creating useful infographics, “I think that information visualization is a necessity in this age of data overload and seeing the forest beyond the trees.” I agree with that statement and personally jump to view the “shiny new storytelling toy” whenever I see an infographic. Infographics represent an exciting new storytelling avenue for nonprofit organizations, enabling them to share important data stories visually.

Infographics as storytelling

Infographics represent a natural extension of storytelling: telling the story of data. It’s not a coincidence that storytelling is growing as we struggle to understand all the information coming at us and overcome cause fatigue.Karen Dietz, who uses storytelling to help businesses grow, says that “infographics are another form of visual storytelling and many of the same oral storytelling principles apply. We’ll be sorting out the issues of authenticity and key messaging and quality as infographics become more popular and easier to produce.” And therein lies the rub: quality. Just as all stories are not created equally, neither are all infographics.

Passing the infographics litmus test

What makes a great infographic? Urs Gattiker, Chief Technology Officer of ComMetrics, frames it perfectly: “The question is, can viewers see the overall shape of the data more easily and quickly with infographics than any other visual aid? Most infographics fail this acid test.” Urs Gattiker’s ComMetrics blog post describes in detail what makes an infographic dashboard or design useful. (It’s chock full of great resources and data.)

Dave, of Communication Nation, created a “manifesto” of what makes a good infographic:

1. It’s a visual explanation that helps you more easily understand, find or do something.
2. It’s visual, and when necessary, integrates words and pictures in a fluid, dynamic way.
3. It stands alone and is completely self-explanatory.
4. It reveals information that was formerly hidden or submerged.
5. It makes possible faster, more consistent understanding.
6. It’s universally understandable.

I would add to this list: The reader does not have to search for the key data points or key story elements.

As Urs points out, it takes quite a bit of time and skill to create a good infographic. A nonprofit needs either money to work with the right designer or have a designer on staff to create a good one. However, you can experiment with some of the DIY infographic tools listed in the infographic ideas and resources at the bottom of this post.

5 ways that nonprofits can use infographics

A Voices for America’s Children infographic.

There are a lot of great ways that nonprofit organizations can use infographics. Below are five ideas for nonprofits that want to tell stories using infographics. Feel free to add to this with your examples and ideas.

1. Show the need for a program. This infographic illustrates the need for clean drinking water. This infographic from the World Wildlife Federation shows the impact of climate change in the coral triangle region of the world.

2. Visualize the data from a report, such as this infographic summarizing the eNonprofit Benchmarks study.

3. Move people to action. Voices for America’s Children created an infographic showing where children live in poverty in the USA, overlaid with where the important elected officials live. The infographic is located adjacent to its “take action” online letter to elected officials.

4. Donation impact. Charity: water created an infographic called How Your Birthday Can Change the World to show the impact of donations.

5. Impact of services. The American Red Cross’ infographic illustrates the many ways that they are helping victims of US natural disasters.

Infographics ideas and resources

Looking for ideas and inspiration? Visual.ly has a pool of community-created infographics that you can subscribe to by RSS. For storytelling inspiration, check out Wilton Blake’s scoop.it curated topic “Storytelling = Nonprofit Sustainability” and Jennifer King’s “Storytelling for Social Change” scoop.it curated topic. Jonha Revsencio curates the scoop.it topic “Awesome Infographics.” Also worth looking through is the Flickr infographics pool. Beth Kanter writes, “Can Stories be Data?,” postulating that storytelling is as much about the stories as it is about the data, while making sense of the data that comes from stories.

Looking for tools? Create and explore your own data visualizations with visual.ly (and this article about it). Check out Wild Apricot’s blog post on tools to make your own infographic. Get started with creating your own charts, diagrams and more: 32 free tools to create different diagrams. Fast Company reviews the five best free tools for making slick infographics.

Related

• Gov 2.0 resources (Socialbrite)

• How charity: water leads the way in social fundraising (Socialbrite)

• Getting started with social media metrics (Socialbrite)

• Social media metrics main page (Socialbrite)

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