By Cal Brackin
Can I have three seconds of your time? What about five seconds of your time? Even a two second difference seems like a big investment and if I haven’t captured your attention by now you are probably ready to move on and if you move on, how can I tell you my story?
I developed these visual storytelling techniques while
serving in the nonprofit world in 2010 as a marketing and outreach volunteer
for Mercy Corps Northwest. During my six months of volunteering, I was editing my
first book, The Unpredictable Course of
Passion, an illustrated-journal of a five-month trip in South America. When
people looked through my book, I noticed that certain images gained more
immediate attention while other images worked better with text. I used these
ideas in the stories I created for Mercy Corps Northwest and found that they
improved my nonprofit storytelling. All of the images featured are my own
illustrations and most featured are from my first book and third book, Tom, which is a life history about my
grandfather’s life. Each point has a deeper reasoning, but for this article I’ll
deliver the essentials.
The first step to
storytelling is capturing your audience’s attention.
If a nonprofit's message doesn’t deliver something immediately, people will lose interest
and move on to another message. Think about people browsing in a bookstore or a
coffee shop with art hanging up. Oftentimes, they will do a “slow walk” and
bypass the stories contained within the books or the deeper messages of the art
until that special something or a, high
value image, catches their eye and they stop to dig deeper into the story.
High value images:
4.
A simplified object with one tone and balanced.
Examples for number (2):
The second step to storytelling is to build the context.
The amount of text can increase, but succinct narratives are
still good to keep in mind and using, context
images, should deliver who, what, and when ideas.
Context images:
1.
Important structures like buildings, landmarks,
or vehicles.
2.
A scene with many points of focus like a busy
street or crowd of people.
3.
A multi-dimensional scene (foreground, mid, and
background).
4.
A map.
Examples for number (1) and (2):
The third step to
storytelling is filling in the story.
When you’ve successfully captured your audience you can
deliver more detailed narratives that are longer and satisfy the reason why
your message is important. The images
that help to fill in that story are, narrative
images.
Narrative images:
1.
Close-up of objects.
2.
Subjects that teach us a lesson like a graph or
chart.
3.
A sequence of related images.
4.
An animal or vegetation (flowers).
5.
A landscape shot.
6.
A scene depicting sameness or vast difference.
7.
An unusual or artistic style of image.
Example of number (3) and (5):
Look at the websites of some nonprofits and see if these
trends fit and look at what is working and what could be better. Is there a
trend to the images that are used to “capture” the audience’s attention, build on the text, or different styles of images throughout the narratives?