When it comes to communication, visual cues are often the most immediately picked up. Developing strong stories can be difficult when the visuals associated with them are lack luster. These visual cues come into play as pictures, logos, videos, info-graphics, and the such. This comes into play with marketing your non-profit, applying for grants, as well as general communication with your primary audiences.

Not only acting professionally, but looking professional is the key, as people will take you more seriously, if your visual media is clean and well made. It is so important, that there are multiple non-profits that are dedicating their skills as visual communicators to helping charities nationwide with their missions; Positive Exposures is a great example of one of these organizations. If you don’t have the professional talent, or equipment, don’t worry! Basic cameras are getting increasingly more impressive, so shooting a professional looking photo doesn’t require much more than some know-how and practice. Here are a few guides to get you started: Photography Life, Photography Concentrate 

When it comes to the general approach one should take with constructing visual media, I’d think of it as if one were writing a story; start with your beginning, middle and end structure. By considering each piece of media as part of this visual story, you’ll better be able to present your visuals, which has an amazing impact on message retention.

Often organizations look to outsource media generation and that is a great opportunity if it’s in the budget, but you’ll still need to know the basics on how to present visual media. Depending on where you are presenting the visuals and what accompanies it, you’ll want to set up your media differently. Here are a few basic steps to doing that:

1. Decide where your media is being shown: social media, news paper, fliers, television
2. Establish who your audience is; who are you expecting to see it? Who do you want to see it?
3.  Determine your message; what is it that you are trying to get across and why is it important?
4. Set up the basic way that you want to tell people about that message; what is the story?
5. Create a storyboard for the content; lay out the pictures or media that you want to use, considering the beginning, middle and end of your story.
6. Edit, edit, edit! You might not get the story right the first time. Play around with it. Ask your friends about it. Try new things!
7. Put it out to the world! You never know how something will be received until you try it out. If you consider your audience, then most likely it will go over well. Maybe it isn’t the response you are looking for, but this is a learning opportunity!

These are just a few steps that I have found to help with generating visual content. There are a lot of guides out there! With a little time, patience and consideration you’ll learn how to use visual media better and better each time. Good luck!

I ended up making an infographic: [embeddoc url=”https://blogs.uoregon.edu/ntarbetnonprofitblog/files/2016/05/TarbetNathan_InfographicFinal-28vd682.jpeg” download=”all” viewer=”google”] Check it out and leave a comment bellow.