Social media is a valuable tool for storytelling, but sharing content is only half of the digital storytelling process. First, you have to create the content you are going to share. This section offers guidance, tools, and best practices for all kinds of content creation—from recording short form videos to building a preliminary website.
Canva, Adobe Suite, and Graphic Design
Choose a Relevant Communication Medium
Before diving into design, it’s important to determine how you will communicate your information. The communication medium of your choosing — for example, flyers, yard signs, social media posts, or digital reports — depends not only on your communication campaign’s goals and purpose, but also on your audience or community’s context and preferences. For example, if you are looking to mobilize community members to attend a protest, but many of them don’t have social media accounts, you may opt for tangible materials like flyers or yard signs. Alternatively, if your community audience is active on social media, online infographics could be an effective medium.
For a more detailed look at different communication mediums, their uses, and how to decide between them, see this Communication Plan for Building Community Resilience.
The Basic Principles of Design
The fundamentals of visual communication lie in the principles of design. Think of these as building blocks for a clear, concise, and aesthetically pleasing visual. A quick Google search will unearth lists of anywhere from seven to 17 key principles of design. The following five principles are some of the most important for frontline community-based orgs looking to do basic design.
Unity
The goal for graphic designers is to achieve a unified piece. This means your final design looks cohesive and conveys your message in a targeted way.
Composition and Balance
Ensure that visuals and text support each other to tell a story. The rule of thirds can be a helpful tip for determining appropriate balance between text, images, and open space and achieving unity. This is a composition technique that leverages the natural behavior of the human eye to arrange information in an easily digestible way. To use this tool, apply a three-by-three grid over your design; the intersections where horizontal and vertical lines meet are natural landing spots for the human eye, making them ideal places to situate critical information, images, and messaging. By helping designers identify the most ideal locations for design elements, the rule of thirds also supports achieving balance, the overall distribution of design elements on the page. Each piece of content in a design has a visual “weight” based on the amount of attention it draws from the viewer. For example, a large, dark image will take up more “weight” on the page than a smaller, lightly colored shape. Using the rule of thirds to achieve an evenly weighted layout can help viewers digest information in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Color
Color theory, the study of which colors harmonize well together and why, is critical in design. The use of color also affects human emotion in cross-cultural and culturally specific ways, so it’s important to understand the ways in which color can be used to influence viewers’ engagement with different media. Creating an engaging color palette can be challenging — online tools like Coolors can simplify the process.
Emphasis
Designs should always have at least one focal point, even in longer-form media like reports and guides. These are often the most important pieces in a design and draw the most attention from the viewer. A focal point can be anything – an image, a piece of text, a graph, or a call to action. When determining your focal point(s), ask yourself: “what is the most important piece of information I want to convey?” Use color, size proportion, the rule of thirds, and repeated elements to direct readers to the core of your message.
Upholding Equity in Design
When creating designs and other visual supplements, it’s important to center accessibility and equity. Consider using colorblind-friendly color palettes and accessible fonts. Similarly, think critically about the ways your designs and communications could be interpreted. Many cultures and communities have different norms and standards for organizing and interpreting information. Storytelling practices vary on local, regional, national, and global scales, and so too will design principles. For example, colors, symbols, and icons can have different meanings in different cultural contexts. The real “golden rule” of design is to tailor your communication methods to your audience and community in a way that resonates.
Communications Tools for Digital Media
There is a world of graphic design tools that can help your organization distribute information and announcements digitally. Here are two of the top, vetted platforms with discounts available for eligible nonprofit organizations. If your organization is ineligible, note that both offer free versions that can be great to get you started.
Canva is a user-friendly tool for graphic design novices. The tool comes with excellent templates to help users create their designs and team collaboration within the tool is easy. Canva Pro is free for nonprofit organizations in multiple countries. See here for more information on eligibility.
Adobe’s creativity and design programs (Illustrator, InDesign, and Adobe Express) are great for those who would like to level up their design skills and have more functions and control in the design process. Adobe provides discounts for eligible nonprofits. See here for more information on eligibility.
Designing a Basic Website
You don’t need to have a big budget or tons of time to build a simple website for your organization. There are lots of free tools out there to help you create a page where people can find you, and where you can showcase all of the work you do.
Tools
All these website builder tools are free to use with a tutorial and guidance. Look at the websites each tool highlights as examples of what you can build and go with your favorite one!
What should we include on our website?
Home page
- Mission
- Values
- Basic biographical information about your group (ex. where you are located)
- Highlight recent work
About us
- History
- Work and impact
- Staff/team
- Any other important people (ex. Board of Directors)
- Contact information
Ways to help or get involved
- Newsletter/listserv
- Social media
- Donations page, if applicable
- Events bulletin, if applicable
Anything else
- FAQs
- Press releases, factsheets, etc.
- Blog page with blog posts
Blogs
In the early 2000s, blogs, or “weblogs,” were the primary tool for communicating with an interested audience. Blogs are composed of many logs, or posts, which can contain images, text, and video. However, these longer-form written posts hosted on a dedicated website are becoming less common with the use of social media platforms.
But that doesn’t mean blogs are unimportant. Many people still do read blog posts, and they are a great form for more detailed information about your organization, including reports on your insights or highlighting members of your team.
Making your Text AI-Friendly
Many people find answers to their questions through AI summaries. When you look something up on the internet today, most search engines will provide you with a summary of the top results that have been generated by artificial intelligence (AI), with sources cited at the bottom of the summary.
These large language models do not “know” information about any of these topics – they “scrape” existing content from other websites and public sources of information to generate these summaries—including yours.
- Say your organization does work around forever chemical pollution in New Jersey, and someone looks up, “What are the impacts of forever chemicals New Jersey?” The AI summary might then pull from your organization’s website (including blog posts) to answer that question.
But this brings us back to the question of data voids—do you want that void filled? If so, do you want to fill that void?
- Refer back to our “Should this story be told?” section. Think about your audience, and who is threatened or benefited when information about your community becomes more readily available.
If you want to fill the void, how do you make sure information is pulled from YOUR site?
There are ways to make the text on your website, blog, and other written resources AI-friendly. If you’ve ever used an LLM (large language model) chat bot, like Claude or ChatGPT, you know there are specific syntaxes used by AI. For example, AI text often has bullet points and em dashes, with text written in brief, distinct chunks. AI also processes language most easily in this format
It boils down to writing simply and provocatively, but there are lots of tips and tricks to writing in this “smart brevity” style available online. Axios, the AI communications software company that developed the style, has a free checklist available here.
