Get supporters involved by sharing your story through pictures

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

The Internet is slowly but surely becoming one big picture book.

Instagram and Pinterest have grown at astronomical rates precicely because they allow people to easily create, curate and share pictures. And Facebook has placed more importance on pictures, with cover images, full screen viewing and newsfeed preferences.

Photos are huge but simply posting photos is not enough. You have to post stories!

A powerful story in a photo earns every one of those thousand words:

• By making people take action.
• By getting people angry.
• By reenergizing volunteers.
• By moving the needle.

Here are 10 tips for creating photos that tell stories:

1Show action. Forget the chummy picture of volunteers with their arms around each other. There’s no story in that. Instead take pictures of them doing what they do.

2Show relationships. Include more than one person in your photos, or maybe a person and their dog like Best Friends Animal Society does. This way, you embed “relationship” into the photo, which will trigger all sorts of emotions in in the viewer.

3Get people angry. The New York Times found that anger, awe and anxiety are the top emotions associated with sharing. Create images that get people angry like this one from the Humane Society of the United States:

4Use infographics. Any combination of information and image used to tell a story can be incredibly powerful. Idealware’s new report, Infographics for Outreach, Advocacy, and Marketing is a super useful guide to understanding and creating infographics.

5Use black and white. You can use Photoshop or Touch Color to tell a story by coloring part of a black and white photo, a la Pleasantville:

6Use words. Many times a picture needs a few words to help the viewer along in the story, like in this photo from the Trevor Project.

One of my favorite iPhone apps for adding text to pictures is Over by Potluck, which allows you to easily add text to photos, like so:

7Use location. Are people growing organic vegetables on a farm? Are they building a house for a family in need? If so, show it.

8Use your fans. Encourage your fans and followers to share their stories in the form of pictures. Create a photo contest, or just pay attention when they post photos to your Facebook page.

9Show contrast. Take something familiar and turn it on its head to tell a story, like Oreo did with its gay pride cookie.

10Show a beginning, middle and end. Create a series of photos that show a beginning, middle and end. For example, imagine a person who lost a leg entering a rehab center, then working with a physical therapist for weeks and finally going home to be with family.

You can post these these photos one by one, or create a single image that includes entire story (ideally you would do both).

Let your heart be your guide

We are storytellers by nature, so our best tool for creating great stories is our hearts. Tune into yours and listen carefully.

If you listen carefully, you will begin to hear a great story. Then post it on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest to see if it speaks as loudly to your community.

What’s your No. 1 tip for telling stories with pictures?

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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!

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