We’ve covered this already but stick to a minimal colour palette and clear fonts. A complex design will complicate your message. The most important thing is to keep it simple. Without trying to put myself out of a job, you don’t need to be a designer to create great infographics. ‘Children of Syria’ from the Save the Children website. The below example from Save the Children uses simple pictograms to help enforce their message. Of course it’s not always possible or necessary to present statistics this way – but it can be useful to add an accompanying icon even when you’re just sharing a quick, straightforward fact. Syria: The Explosive Truth, tweeted by Action on Armed Violence. Showing 93 of the 100 icons like this helps to highlight the enormity of the violence in a way that the basic numbers just can’t. This method is also useful when displaying percentages, particularly when outlining an effect on a group of people, as in the example below from Action on Armed Violence. Taking a very simple icon (like the clock in this example for Macmillan Cancer Support) and repeating it multiple times to show two comparison numbers is one of the clearest ways of displaying this type of data.Ī section of the ‘Cancer: A Colossal Challenge’ infographic from Macmillan Cancer Support. The pictogram and colour coding help translate the message even more clearly.Ī section of the ‘Tobacco vs Meat: What’s the Risk?’ infographic from Cancer Research UK.Īnother good way of emphasising the difference between two numbers is by breaking the number down and literally visualising the amount. Representing percentages as comparatively scaled circles is a great way of highlighting the difference between two figures. This example from Cancer Research UK shows how size can help get a message across. Over the last few years many charities have been utilising them very effectively in their social channels.

Some charities who are doing it right…Īlthough not a new phenomenon, infographics have grown in prevalence alongside the rise of social media.

Combining this with Edgar Dale’s influential findings that audiences are 200% more likely to remember what they see than what they read, it’s clear that infographics are a hugely valuable tool for your charity. And for good reason too – researchers at Adobe found that social posts containing an image had an engagement rate 600% higher than text-based posts. Google Trends shows that searches for the term continue on an upward curve and, as of November 2015, infographics are as popular as ever. Recent reports on the death of the infographic have been greatly exaggerated. But what is an infographic? Well, as the portmanteau of ‘information and graphics’ suggests, infographics are a visual representation of information and data. As Michelle mentioned in our last design team blog post, infographics offer a quick and effective way to communicate information about your charity.

Charity infographic icons