 Hi, my name is Wes Holing and I'm a senior web content developer here at TechSoup and let's talk about infographics. A lot of nonprofits want to create infographics. Researchers found that colored visuals increase people's willingness to read a piece of content by 80%. It also increases retention by more than 50% and content with images get 94% more views than content without relevant images. That's why I'll be covering infographic strategies in this quick overview. When you break down the contents of any infographic, they fall into just two categories, data and graphics and headers and body copy. The first category includes charts, graphs, and other data visualizations, but also photos and illustrations to serve your larger point. The second category is your title, sub headers, and the text that puts the whole graphic and its component parts into context. Take this graphic from Give Local America. We can see one section on its own. These are the top five communities that gave as part of this fundraising event on a single day in May 2014. It's basically just a bar chart, but looking at the whole thing, it boils down to one large graphic, which is the chart, its data, the numbers, the copy, which are the labels and notes at the bottom, and a header plus a graphic in the upper left just for fun. More data drives the quality of your infographic. Without data, an infographic is more of a digital poster, which is fine if you want to just create a fun image, but the purpose of an infographic is first to inform, then to entertain. Great infographic does both, leaving its viewer with more information than he or she started with because it was fun to learn. Here's another one. This is from Greek Body Codex, weight loss and strength training site. It lists when popular fruits and vegetables are in season. Now, again, simple delivery of data. Peppers are in season from April through December, indicated by the colors applied to those months. Breaking this down again, it's simple. An illustrated pepper in the center, a colored wheel of months around it, and copy to put it in context. So let's cover the basic process of making an infographic. There are steps for designing one if you're an expert with R and illustrator or a beginner who's considering infogram or pictochart. It's worth knowing what goes into them and how you can tell your mission and your constituent stories visually. What better way to illustrate the infographics process than with an infographic? I really like this graphic from Infographics Lab 203, a South Korean design firm. I'll walk through each of these steps to explain some of their finer points. This process goes from something as simple as selecting the topic of your infographic all the way through gathering and analyzing the data, sketching out your idea, editing it all together and then testing it and completing it just to make sure that everything works with your audience. Of course, this infographic also assumes that you have an in-house designer, editor and data analyst, which let's be honest, not a lot of nonprofits have. So when it comes to infographics that I create, I pretty much do this myself. So I'm going to assume that you do too. So the process that is laid out in that infographic basically comes down to these 10 steps. First, pick a goal. That could include donations, engagement, information, et cetera. Second, find inspiration. Look at other infographics. There's no need to invent something new. You can just find what works. Third, find and analyze the data. What do you have to work with and what can you get? Number four, find a story to tell in the data. This doesn't need an actual person, but it can be a story of an issue or the state of things and it should follow the same narrative arc that you find in just about any other graphic or story. Number five, sketch it out. I literally sketched my infographics out on paper with a pen first and I cannot draw. So this is a great exercise to get it on paper and see how it's going to look. Number six, lay it out. Picking a template or drawing the basics with places for graphics and copy is a great way to look. You can just draw boxes where a copy is going to go. Don't worry about writing it down on paper first. Number seven, determine the look. Pick your colors, your fonts, your images, and your graphics. If you have a brand, this is exactly where it's going to come into play, picking your colors and your fonts. If not, find something that looks a lot like the collateral that your organization may already use that you happen to like. Number eight, write the copy. This is just for context and you really shouldn't be writing very much copy at all. This is just headers and sub headers and maybe just a little bit of description here in there. Number nine, iterate. The review process is just for smoothing the rough edges. So show it to other people, get their opinions, and continue to collaborate with people who are also have a stake in this infographic. And the last step, of course, is to publish your infographic. This is on your blog, on a social channel, via email. You could even create it as an actual printed poster if you think it really gets the job done. This process will take you from start to finish for creating a quality infographic. I highly recommend using Adobe Illustrator CC to do that too. Illustrator is the gold standard for graphic design and it will allow you to create all of the elements in your infographic from the layout and copy to the charts and illustrations. TechSoup has plenty of resources for you to get and learn Illustrator as well. Check out our access to discounted rates on Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes Illustrator and courses from TechSoup courses on how to use it. Thanks so much and good luck with your graphics.