 Hi everybody, I'm Ali Bizdikian, Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSuit. I'm very happy to be here with you all today to present my colleagues, Wes Hohling and Jim Lynch. We'll pick off this program with Wes to discuss the topic of the day, which is what makes infographics so compelling and effective. Later on I'll bring on Jim Lynch who will give you a roundup of recent articles you might find interesting and helpful. As always, this TechSuit 30 event will be recorded and posted inside the course module later on so that you could return to it at a later time whenever you want at your convenience as well as all the resources listed will be given to you in chat as well as recorded in the module. Alright, so here we go. Let's bring on Wes Hohling. Wes is a senior web content developer here at TechSuit and he makes infographics. Wes, take it away. Alright, thanks Ali. Hi everybody, as Ali mentioned, my name is Wes Hohling and part of my job here at TechSuit is creating graphics. For example, if you subscribe to our By the Cup newsletter, I make the little images that go in that as well as other things throughout the site and our social media. And I try to make as many infographics as I can for TechSuit. It's kind of a fun hobby of mine and I think if you're on this webinar then it's appealing to you as well. And I'll say that infographics are really compelling because the visual element makes it really easy for the audience to retain information. Of course, as a nonprofit, your mission is very important. It helps benefiting a lot of people so you've got a lot to draw on telling compelling stories using compelling imagery and drawing from a great source of information that you've accumulated over a long time of work. Companies tend to use infographics to market their products and non-profits can use infographics in much the same way trying to get people to donate or take action like volunteering or organizing. Whatever the action that you need your audience to take, infographics can do that in a compelling visual way. Now a lot of the infographics you've probably seen online, on Facebook and Twitter, on Pinterest, tend to be those long column style graphics with a lot of bright photographs or illustrations peppered throughout. And it's hard to know exactly what makes a good infographic and for the record this is just one man's opinion so definitely do your research on what would work for your organization but I'll give you my two cents on what makes a good one and what you should avoid. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here to show off a few that I've accumulated. Let me see if I can grab that. And you might see some tunnel vision for just a moment but it won't last. Let's bring up this folder here. So I'm going to go way, way back in infographic history to 1854. I promise this won't be too boring. There was a cholera epidemic in London and a physician by the name of John Snow. No relation to the guy from Game of Thrones for the record was tasked with investigating it. At the time this is before germ theory so no one knew exactly why this was happening. They thought it was the result of what they called like bad air or pollution. So John Snow went about knocking on the doors of everyone in the effective area to see what their experience was with cholera whether they or someone in their home had been affected by it and then plotted it against a city map. And this is a map of London here, just or one neighborhood rather in Soho. And you can see and I'll zoom in a little bit here too. If I can zoom, there we go. So this is Broad Street right here. And you can see there's a large accumulation of dark notches around that street. And there's a pump right in the center here. By creating this graphic and by documenting the data that he had accumulated, he was able to demonstrate to the local government that everything was surrounding this one pump, this one water pump on Broad Street, and they just removed the handle from that water pump that everybody in the neighborhood was getting water from. And the cholera epidemic almost went away overnight. It's a great example of how you can take seemingly dry data, put it into a visual representation and affect real change. Now, of course, I'm not expecting your infographics to cure cholera or anything, but it is one of the earliest examples of how effective infographics can be. Another great graphic from around the same time was from Charles Menard, who documented the size of troop movements across Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. You can see from the left a thick tan line starting from Paris, moving eastward to Moscow, getting thinner as it goes. And then after a defeat there, having to trudge all the way back to France, getting progressively thinner as war and attrition took out more troops. A really nice thing about this graphic is not only does the line represent the size of the troops, but it's also against basically a map. If you look at the left here, you can see there's a river going down, other rivers along the way, and then, of course, Moscow highlighted in the upper right. A great use of data and, again, one of the earliest examples of infographics at work. Now, these are a little dry. They're a little monochromatic, for example. So let's take a look at some more modern examples. This is one that I found from a company called Bus Bank. This is not a nonprofit, but that shouldn't limit you from your research in looking at other great examples of infographics. This is just documenting travel information during Thanksgiving. I'll go ahead and zoom in on this one a little bit as well. So you can see they're breaking down just various bits of information, how people travel at that time, where they're going, and who's traveling, and on which roads they're traveling and all that. It's a nice, clean presentation. I would say just maybe a little bit more color would really help this pop, but other than that, the data is well represented in pie charts, in bar charts. One thing I would say as far as its data is lacking a little bit, though, up here we've got how do we travel, and this is something I would say to avoid in your graphics. People are traveling by car, airplane, bus, train. The numbers here represent the amount, and you can see that by car is by far overwhelming. Almost 92% of travel, but visually, this is size. The icons are all the same size. It's a great missed opportunity to take that data and represent it visually. So it's a much larger circle for the 92%, and much smaller for the other three, for example, would be a great way to show that either in circles or icons or bar or something that just shows the relative size of those numbers. Let's move on to another one here. This one is from Austria, and so forgive the German here, but I'll explain what's going on in this one. This is a great example of using a photograph for your graphics. A lot of the infographics that you tend to see are illustrations, graphs and charts, things like that. In this one, a photographer took half of a shopping cart and filled it with necessary objects, and what this is promoting on behalf of a nonprofit organization there is showing the audience what the amount of welfare, like a welfare recipient receives and how much that divides up into their monthly needs. So, for example, at the top is represented its rent and electricity, things like that. Next, it's showing hygiene articles and then clothes, your phone, tobacco, a little bit of tobacco in there. Basically, and then at the bottom, of course, your food stuffs, showing how much, how beneficial that fund is for the people who rely on it. And it's done in a really great way by showing the fullness of the cart and basically the necessity of the items. So as far as things to avoid, I did mention one thing I didn't like about that first graphic, the bus bank one. Sorry, let me hide that. Let me bring up an example here. This was a correction from a, if you see on the left, it was an infographic that Vox created about where we donate our money and then which are the most deadly diseases. And on the right, coolinfographics.com, which is an infographics design firm, did a corrected version. So I think this is a great example of some missed opportunities. On the left, you'll see they've created a legend at the top, color coding each disease. So heart disease is up there, diabetes, prostate cancer. And then all along the two columns here on the left and the right, the money raised and then the number of deaths in the US. Coolinfographics.com made a great point here that by adding labels to each circle, your eye doesn't have to jump from the circle back to the legend, back to the circle, back to the legend. You want a nice clean, vertical way to read it. So if you think about when you read a book, for example, or you look at a billboard, your eye is expected to go from one place to the other in a smooth transition. And it's not doing that on the left, but it is doing that on the right. They also took one step further, which I think is also a nice touch. They grouped the money raised with the deaths. So you can easily compare, again, without having to jump up and down, let me see if we're heart disease on this side versus on that side. Heart disease is on the same horizontal line. So heart disease on top, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on the second line, diabetes, breast cancer, and so on. So that makes it easy to see where we're putting our money versus how deadly that particular illness is. Here's another great one from the New York Times. And this is very simple. And I'll say that one other really nice element for good infographics is their simplicity. It's very tempting. I've fallen victim to this many times to try and cram as much as you can in there. You find that your issue is very important, and you want to tell everyone everything about it. But in the end, you want them to take away the most crucial information. And this really does a great job of that by demonstrating the timeline of gay marriage in the US. So looking at 2008 until 2015 when it was legalized by the Supreme Court in every state, you can see which states abandoned just by law, which ones by constitutional amendment, and which ones had legalized. It's starting in the Northeast and then spreading throughout the Midwest in places like Iowa, and then eventually in the entire country. It takes almost no text, and it conveys a very clean piece of information. That brings me to another point, too, is the amount of text in your graphic. It's, again, very easy to try and over-explain things or, you know, assume that your text is very crucial. Normally it is if you're creating an annual report, a postcard. Your text really is crucial to it. But for infographics, it's kind of the opposite. You want your visuals to carry the information. Let me show you a good example of that here as well. This is one from Save the Children in affecting the children of Syria. It's a great looking graphic. There's a compelling photograph at the top. There's a lot of information along the way. It's a little text heavy, though, and the text representing data points isn't really demonstrated visually. There are icons, and the text is treated nicely. It's big. It's easy to see that there's 6.8 million affected, and there's one in three children have been hit or shot at. There's very important information here, but it's not quite visually represented in the data. But one thing I will say that's great about this graphic, in addition to the compelling photo at the top and the layout, is down here at the bottom saying that there are two ways to help. So the expectation is that you are reading this from top to bottom. There is compelling information along the way, but the seriousness and the gravity of the issue, and then giving the audience something to do at the end, signing their petition and donating to their mission. It's very important to consider what the goal of your infographic is from the beginning. It's nice to have something just fun to share, but in the end, your goal is really to get people active, to help make them take part in your mission, either by giving to it or working directly in it. Something else I'd like to point out, too, is where and how to make your infographics. Now, this is an issue that I touch on in some of the other content that we've created. We've talked in other videos and, like, for some of our webinars and some of our pre-recorded videos on how to create graphics, where to create them. For example, I'll hop on over to my browser here. In our 20 Days of Adobe page, which you may have gotten here from, if you haven't, it's available at info.techsuit.org slash 20 Days of Adobe. That's all hyphens in between those words. On day 14, we've got a video here that's an introduction to creating effective infographics. I highly recommend checking out that as well if the voice sense is familiar. It's because I'm recording that one as well. But that's a great introduction to the process of creating an infographic, whether you're creating it, or you're working on a team that's creating it, you're collaborating with someone else who's creating it, or you're just hiring someone to make it for you. It's a great introduction to knowing what to expect in that process. If you do want to create it yourself, but you've never done it before, I would recommend a couple of online options. First, there's InfoBrand, that's infogr.am, it's free. Of course, you can pay to get a more deluxe version of it, but if you just want to try it out, you definitely can. It makes it very easy to take data that you've got in, say, an Excel spreadsheet, import it in, or just start designing with your own information, either a map or in a chart or a graph. Of course, you can see here, Infographic or Report is one of the options right away. It's intended solely to create infographics for people who are lacking more advanced software, like Illustrator, for example. Another great option is PictoChart. Again, same approach with creating it online in a sort of cloud-based service. Click Infographic here, and they give you a lot of nice templates to start with. These are all very clean, the layouts are great, and they're not too busy with text, so these are some great templates to start with. As far as which one to choose, I will say that InfoGram does give you the option of importing data, whereas PictoChart is more creating the graphic from scratch within their service. Both are great, both are free, and both give you different options the more you upgrade. I highly recommend checking out those. I know a lot of nonprofits also like to use Canva, and no dig against Canva, but it's not necessarily an Infographic-based service. This is great for creating social media posts and postcards, posters, things like that, but it's not necessarily geared for creating data visualizations, for example. Great if you just have some text that you want to stylize and make really interesting if it's a piece of information and all that, but if you have actual data that you want to visualize, maybe stick with the other two, like InfoGram and PictoChart. A couple of other things I wanted to highlight as well in terms of what to know about creating a good Infographic are some of the other resources that we've got here at TechSoup. As I mentioned on our 20 Days of Adobe page, we've got the video about the process of creating an Infographic. I also wanted to point out a couple of things in Illustrator, this and some of our other webinars that you may want to check out. Illustrator has a tool here on the left. This is the bar chart icon here. It gives you a lot of options for creating column graphs, bar graphs, lines, pie charts, of course, the biggest asset in your Infographic toolkit. If you have Illustrator but haven't used this tool before, it's very simple by just clicking, choosing a size. You can enter your spreadsheet data here if you've got it or you can import it as well with this button here. But if I just enter, let's say I've got 5, 10, 25, and another 4. It doesn't quite look right as far as a pie chart, but if you stack your data vertically, you can create a size comparison, which if you think back to my advice for this Infographic here, how do we travel section at the top would be nicely represented if they've done something similar to this, creating different sizes for representing car, airplane, bus, and train, and that's easily done here in Illustrator. Of course, if we want to flip our data like this, then we get our old friend the pie chart. If we are working with pie charts, one thing I would also recommend if you're doing it in Illustrator especially is it gives you a pie chart, but it looks, I'll be honest, it looks terrible from the start. If we ungroup it, we can begin to change things and make them look a little more appealing. For example, I'm going to get rid of that stroke around the pie slices. Let's say we'll do, oops, I got rid of the color. Apply it to the stroke. Now the colors all touch together, which looks a little cleaner, and if I apply some color to really represent what I'm talking about here, it looks a little more compelling than that original black and white. What I can also do is even though I got rid of that stroke, if I reintroduce the stroke, but keep it white or whatever the color of the background is, and even increase the size a bit, I'd have to clean up the center a little bit because the stroke is beginning to cut into one of the slices, but it does create a nice pull out effect that if I want to say that, you know, if I really want to call out the size difference among all of them I can, I could even bring out one slice and then say, well, this particular slice is the most interesting for whatever reason. So there's a lot of great options for creating these sorts of graphics in Illustrator. Even though Illustrator, of course, tends to be more for creating, of course, illustrations, the chart tool is especially helpful for creating nice clean data visualizations that you can use elsewhere. I want to return to some of these other infographics here to point out just a couple of other things to avoid while I've still got a few minutes left. This is one that I found, and I don't know who the source was, so I can't apologize to them, but I do have to use this as a good example of what not to do. One thing you can do with infographics is to outline a process. For example, if you are working in prison reform and you want to demonstrate the difficulty for convicts to appeal their conviction and you want to show that long process and how difficult it is and all the obstacles that they have to overcome along the way, that would be a great way to demonstrate a process as a piece of data. Here they're trying to demonstrate the phases of clinical trials for pharmaceuticals but you can see that they begin at the top here with start here. Meanwhile, there's these other parts of the process that it seems to either connect to and then go nowhere or those are things that they start with that then feed into the discovery and development. It's very difficult to follow this process and know exactly where it starts and ends. It's also very text heavy. A lot of these things could be represented visually, so side effects, benefits, technology. These are all things that there are a plethora of icons for that could be used to represent these a little better. It's also very busy, very tight packed. You want to give your elements a lot of room to breathe. If we look at some of the other graphics that I showed a moment ago, I'll hop over to one of those. Let's say this one, for example, a lot of breathing room. You can see the difference here. This is like a breath of fresh air compared to the last one. There's a lot of space in between each of these rows. The creator is careful to not crowd everything too much. You may not have a lot of room horizontally because it may have to fit on a page, for example, on a web page or on social media posts. But vertically, the sky is kind of the limit. That's why you tend to see a lot of tall vertical infographics rather than wide ones because they tend to have to conform to the size of the container that they're posting to online. It looks like I'm just about out of time. Let me hop back over to my browser window here and stop screen sharing for a moment just to... I think I'm stopping screen sharing. There we go. Just to say thanks for sticking around. I've got a great course that I'm putting together with Susan Hope Bard, our TechSoup courses leader on infographics that's coming shortly. I'd recommend staying tuned for that one, checking in with TechSoup courses for that. In the meantime, thanks for sticking around and I'll throw it back to Allie. Thanks, Allie. Great. Thank you so much, Wes. That was very rich, full of examples, a lot of helpful websites. Again, if you have any questions for Wes, please chat those in or comments. Do that now as I turn it over to Jim, our senior content writer. Jim, please give us that helpful roundup of articles and resources that these folks might find valuable. Jim? Okay. Hi, everybody. Jim Letcher, I'm going to screen share right here. There we go. All right. Is this coming in okay? All right. TechSoup members really love cloud services and that's no wonder because there's little, little choice anymore in our world where the cloud is becoming king. This is a survey we did a couple of months ago and we just wanted to tell everybody what we have going and what people liked. It was about 2,000 people who took the survey and the big surprise to us was that not that a lot of people use cloud services, but they kind of liked them. And so that was the big, huge surprise. The killer app that people like is online storage. So one drive is an example of that. Dropbox is another one that was cited most, very often. And then Google Drive is the one that's most used. There is a bunch more in this thing that we found out about. No huge surprises, but I think really interesting to compare where you're at with where a bunch of other charities are at as well on this. So I'm moving on. This one's interesting. This comes from our TechSoup Canada folks. There's money for your nonprofit. So not becoming news in that aren't solely based on just straight donations. So this is how to hands on pretty simple, plainly written people that gets you through the steps of doing this. It doesn't read the technical part of how to set up an e-commerce site on your website. And so we have other content for that. Pretty good new article that we've got up there. This is an article that I like on some hidden gems in our donation program on TechSoup. We're at the fiscal year-end time when everybody is in a flurry to get spend down their budgets for the fiscal year. And I think a majority of charities in the U.S. have their fiscal year-end at the end of June. So that's this month. One extraordinary thing that launched this year is Airbnb social impact experiences. That's a totally free thing that you can use. And it's an extraordinary new offer from Airbnb, the people that offer house sharing or room sharing. It's experience sharing. You can actually sign up for that and show people what you do. Box is one of those document online storage things that we have that's very, very reasonable and affordable and really useful. Mobile beacon is one of the things I just want to talk about because it's incredible. It's $10 a month for unlimited broadband internet that you can take anywhere. So I love that one. And so there are a bunch more that we talk about here. One of the newest ones that just came in is something called Veritas. I love that one because it's back. Well, folks, I think we lost our Jim Lynch. Not to worry. I went ahead and chatted out the links of the articles and resources that he was referring to. So feel free to go check them out. And let us know if you found them helpful. So we are at time. Again, thanks to the guests for today, the expert guests, Wes, Holing and Jim Lynch. And please do join us for our next event. The date for that is June 20th with the fantastic Molly Bacon. She's the social media manager for TechSoup who will discuss the best practices when using social media. So stay tuned for that event. Please join us again. That's something you have interest in or would like to learn more about. Come back next week. Same time, same place. And as always, please take the post-event survey so that we can hear your feedback and continue to create these events around the topics that you care about most that you want to see and learn about. And again, those can be found in the module for today's event. Thank you all for joining us today. This has been fun. Have a great rest of your day and have a lovely week. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.