Enhance your story!

Using visuals to tell your nonprofit’s story is a great way to spread awareness and create a case for giving. More and more nonprofits, charities, and even businesses are seeing the impact that images can make throughout their campaigns. But creating visuals and campaign graphics can often be costly, time consuming, and feel overwhelmingly difficult.

Contrary to what many may think, it’s not impossible to create beautiful visuals and impactful graphics without advanced software, and it doesn’t have to cost you half of your budget either.  We’ve done some homework, and created a list of nine tips and tools for creating visuals that can be used to increase donations, illustrate your nonprofit’s story, and help raise money for your organization… and they're easier than you might think!

1. As always, keep is simple; keep it consistent. Focus on branding your graphics and images, and maintaining a consistent look or color.


2. Share your organization’s accomplishments with stats and data using PictoChart. This resource has a number of free templates to choose from that allow you input numbers, percentages, graphs, and more into colorful infographics that you can share on social media or include in blogs. 


3. Highlight quotes and facts with Canva. It has templates for Facebook covers, social media posts, posters, blog graphics, web, and more! It's qickly becomming one of our favorite tools; Our cover image for this post, and the social media posts were made using Canva. Did we mention that it’s free? 


4. Ever wonder where those funny memes come from? Check out PicMonkey and use your images to show off your funny side. It’s an easy online tool for spicing up photos that you already have. While you have access to a bunch of editing features for free, the full package is worth the $33 a year.


5. Make sure you have the proper image sizes for your social media channels. We have a cheat sheet here.


6. If different image file types confuse you, here is a helpful infographic that distinguishes each file type (.jpg, .gif. png) and explains how best to use them.


7. Pixabay is a great resource for free stock images. You can search for over 480,000 high quality photos, illustrations, and vector graphics to use commercially.


8. Sometimes, the fonts in Word just don’t cut it. Que 1001 Fonts- free, downloadable fonts that you can use commercially. It’s available for Mac and Windows.


9. Take pictures with your phone (yes, phone photos are ok!) of events and use them on your social media channels, or your newsletters. Show your subscribers and followers who your really are with behind the scenes photos. If you want to spice them up, import them into PicMonkey or Canva for edits.

Creating visuals is at its core, all about enhancing your nonprofit’s story. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, Blondies. Use graphics to connect with donors and contributors in a fun, engaging way. Be creative! Start a social media photo contest or post photos of team members with fun quotes. Remember that whatever photo edit or stock image you choose, it should be a reflection of the mission and values of your organization.

All my love,

Blondie

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