On a stretch of highway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe there’s a billboard. On the left side it shows smiling children in front of an adobe house with a large solar panel. On the right it shows close ups of belching smoke stacks from a coal fired power plant; overlaid with the message “Don’t let coal hold us back.” We’re pretty confident most people will see clean energy as the hopeful future; coal part of the gloomy past.
But I see something different. I see Resource Media’s long trail of discovery that led to our website Visual Story Lab producing real results on the ground. The imagery on the billboards is directly informed by testing we did last year. We are always questioning assumptions about what pictures will work these days. In 2014 alone, we will lead image-testing projects on energy efficiency, coal export, arctic land protection and how extreme weather photos influence people’s willingness to act on climate change. Assessing our partners’ use of images has become a core service at Resource Media. Really, though, we are just following our own advice.
It has been one year since we launched Visual Story Lab and released the guide to using imagery “Seeing is Believing.” We knew we were onto something important, something needed in the world of social change. We couldn’t have predicted the response. 5000 downloads of the guide to date. It has been downloaded on all seven continents and translated in to Arabic. We have also had 1800 visits to our ever growing library of resources; updated tips from our staff and others about using imagery effectively. Webinars and trainings are in constant demand. Most recently, Curtis Chang cited our guide and blog in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as the most useful comprehensive online resource for NGOs looking to understand the fundamentals of visual communication. Very gratifying to have struck such an optical nerve. Very grateful to staff members like Liz Banse, whose persistence and dedication to this work from the days when this project was a personal dream kept alive on nights and weekends. Very grateful to funders like The Brainerd Foundation and the Compton Foundation who saw the need for this work and provided early support.
So what’s ahead in year two? Certainly more tip sheets and other materials that help share our learning with the field. We know practical advice is used and shared. If there’s a question or a need you’ve identified in your work, please let us know. We’d also like to share more examples of visuals used effectively. If there’s an example you’ve seen or, even better, that you’ve completed yourself where pictures seem particularly effective, let us know. We’ll continue to test images and keep abreast of other emerging research. Finally, we are offering a new service, a concise diagnostic assessment of imagery, messages and digital reach that will offer real, doable recommendations for sharpening your communications. Again, please drop us a line if you’d like to learn more.
When we launched Visual Story Lab, we made the case that we had entered the golden age of photography thanks to ubiquitous cameras in everyone’s pockets and multiple platforms for sharing those pictures immediately. Today the numbers continue to stagger the imagination. It is estimated in 2014, humankind will take nearly 1 trillion photos compared to just 86 billion in the year 2000. 350 million photos a day will be uploaded to Facebook alone. 7.3 million people access Instagram every day where, a site where 20 billion pictures have been shared in just three and a half years. The figures go on and on…we are clearly a visual species. But with all that competition for your audience’s eyeballs, being strategic about how you use imagery is more important than ever. We look forward to doing our part to keep you up to speed.
