Visual.ly Lets Social Innovators Share Infographics

“A picture is worth a thousand words” says nothing about what a picture shared is worth. As sharing information online has become only likes, tweets, and reshares away, social entrepreneurs and social innovators are finding new ways to harness Web 2.0 to articulate the social impact of their business ideas. They are thinking outside the graph for new ways to tell a story.

Infographics – Powerful tools in storytelling

One powerful tool in storytelling is the infographic. What likely started with creative interpretations of bar, pie, and line graphs has morphed into an art form of its own. It has become a quest to make statistics compelling—both in what they say and how they say it.

An infographic is short-form for information graphic. It is a visual depiction of a set of statistical information, data sets, or procedural/organizational flow.

Visual.ly is a place to post and share infographics

One site that is becoming a library of infographics, is Visual.ly. Currently a place to showcase and distribute image-rich infographics, the site is also working on tools to create infographics.

As visual.ly explains it “Infographics and data visualizations are shifting the way people find and experience stories, creating a new way of seeing the world of data. They help communicate complex ideas in a clear, compact and beautiful way, taking deep data and presenting it in visual shorthand.”

How can using infographics help social innovators?

providing a visual way to manage multiple variables (i.e. monetary profit, social impact profit, financial cost, environmental cost, community involvement etc.)
depicting how your company can achieve a competitive triple bottom line
creating an elaborate flow chart to connect the different players in the supply chain
showing various sources and levels of funding that will be required
illustrating ‘the cause’ the company is addressing and the mission of how it will impact change
setting your social venture apart from the competition

A few infographics from Visual.ly

Here are are a few cause-related infographics from the Visual.ly library. You can create an account and add any that your company has been working on.