Nonprofit Spark – “How to use your photos for storytelling – 07/09/12″




Nonprofit Spark - Renee McGivern show

Summary: On this week's show, we explore what you can do to build a collection of great photos that tell the story of your organization. This is another "show and tell" show, which means we want you to look something we're talking about. In this case, We review a blog post (http://www.branded4good.com/blog/photos)that shows examples of photos in online annual reports, on donation pages, in e-newsletters and on Facebook. My guest is Julie Damon, CEO and marketing director of Branded4Good, (http://www.branded4good.com) a company that provides nonprofit marketing and website development services to help organizations build their brand and support their fundraising. Julie and I are particularly passionate about this topic because we're the ones who actually work with the photos you take. Most of them, frankly, are not good and sometimes, there's not even one worth showing from a batch of 200 images you send us. Not having great photos is a lost opportunity for telling your organization's unique story. All the text and explanations in the world are not as powerful as a few great photographs. Julie and I make lots of suggestions here, and I hope you'll be inspired to try even just a couple of them over the next year, and then a couple more the year after that. Within a few years, you'll have a library of great images at your fingertips to use to you pull people closer to your organization and into caring deeply about it. To support you in learning more about photography, I suggest you listen to an interview I did last year with the awards manager for the nonprofit, PhotoPhilanthropy. About 20 minutes into that episode, we review a slideshow of stunning images telling the story of an orphanage in Transylvania. That show, Powerful Photographic Storytelling (http://webtalkradio.net/2011/08/15/nonprofit-spark-%E2%80%93-powerful-photographic-storytelling-081511/), aired the week of August 15, 2011.