This week’s assignment is to look at infographics that align with my blog. I hadn’t thought about them with nonprofits and social media before. I spent this week focused on them and figuring out what the consensus on them was in the nonprofit community.
I had trouble finding nonprofits that did them. I asked the volunteers and employees of the nonprofits I interviewed this week:
I noticed that you didn’t have many infographics. Is there a reason behind it?
Here are a few of their responses.
“That’s for a different audience. We send that out a lot of times to donors, particularly those who are what I call ‘heavy hitters’. People who care more about that. What I think we found is that we share some statistics. When I post about a village or when we finish a project, I’ll post how many families and how many people it impacted.” said Debbie Tingley, project manager for Hands to Heart and a board member of the Lanna Foundation. “I think for us, it’s the emotional aspect. People are not grabbing at those numbers. Photos are really big. Emotional photos. Like someone experiencing the water for the first time. Those are things that grab people’s hearts. With our email, we show more of that as it’s going out to a network to a group of people with a higher income, where that matters more.”
“No, I don’t know why. I use infographics a lot in our reports that are going out directly to donors in our emails but I don’t use them on social media.” said Kate Allen, communications officer for Ponheary Ly Foundation. “I think we’ve had an issue in the past with putting out statistics on social media as we try not to be too statistic-heavy on social media. It’s more about telling stories, I would say. Stats are more for donor reports. That’s just the way we tend to do it.”
“Well, two reasons. One is more practical. One is that I am not a graphic designer and that’s not my background. So I really haven’t had the time or expertise to do those. We do have a new marketing director and she will probably be putting some of those together. I do expect that we will be doing that more this year,” said Barbara Neiberg, communications and social media lead for Love Without Boundaries Foundation.“Honestly for us, when we have posted graphics, we find that photos are more effective for our audience than infographics or graphic posts. I don’t know why but that is what our audience responds to. Like close up photos of children in our program.”
While these nonprofits don’t put infographics on social media, they use them to connect with donors. They have found that infographics don’t affect their target audience, but they do with donors. I think nonprofits should look at their social media statistical analytics and piece together what works for them.
So I think the usage depends on the organization, and there is no right or wrong way to use infographics.
I do think that using infographics is strategic communication. I think in the case of this infographic that I found, the message does come across very quickly and is easy to understand. I think that this is the type of infographic that nonprofits should use when communicating with donors and especially with their target audience if they choose to do so. The other ones I looked at were rather busy, with much information crammed into them. This is simple yet effective.
It’s been an exciting week, doing these interviews and learning about infographics and how nonprofits can use them. I had never looked closely for infographics on social media, but I will now.
