So How Do You Create those graphics?

I am often asked during presentations, how did you create those great graphics?  Well, first I subscribed to Tom Kuhlman's blog over at Articulate: http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/.Tom has tons of posts on how to create your own graphics, using existing graphics. I also like to take a ton of screenshots, this way I can show exactly what I want to my attendees to see on a specific social media platform, without worrying that the site might have changed, or without other distractions or worse, problems with the internet connection.  

But how do you get those screenshots?

There are two quick and easy ways to capture screenshots.

1.  Snipping Tool (Windows 7 only):

 *   Go to the Start Menu, Accessories, Snipping Tool.
 *   Once opened your screen will turn white and you can drag a red rectangle over the desired portion of the screen.
 *   In the window that pops up you can  save your Snip.

2.  Print Screen:

 *   With image you want on the screen hold down the Alt key and press the PrntScrn key. This key is located somewhere on the top right of your keyboard.
 *  Now you can save your picture.

I've got my pic, now what?

I've found that opening up my screenshot in PowerPoint and playing around with cropping the picture, adding shapes, like an arrow or circle or blurring out someone's face in the screenshot helps me to create graphics that show what I want my attendees 

Making your PowerPoint Presentation Interesting

People say they hate PowerPoint presentations. This is not news. Nor is it news that what they really hate are uninteresting PowerPoint presentations. You know the one's that rely on the standard PowerPoint template and only use the bullet point outlines to organize their presentation.

How Does One Improve their PowerPoint Presentation?

First, buy some books and attend some trainings (F2F or IRL) on how to make your PowerPoint slides more interesting. Check out some simple graphic design books too! One of the best tips I found was to create your own photos and clipart. When you are using your own images you don't have to worry about copyright infringement or your participants connecting your images to some other text in their heads.  For example, recently I was working on revising a presentation that discussed special education teams. The photos for the slides looked like this:

I'm concerned that this may result in some cognitive dissonance. As a curriculum designer and presenter I know that my participants are learning new vocabulary and trying to shift their thinking on certain preconceived notions. Thus I don't want cutesy pictures either. I want to be mindful that a picture of a boys baseball team might make people think of winning--there is no "winning" in special education, teams aren't competing, they are working collaboratively, no one team member is more important than another.  I also don't want families to think, "my child will never play on a team like this."  I don't think this is over-thinking things, you may however, disagree.  I'm thinking I may have to get a few friends together, hand out some photo disclosure forms and snap a few pictures.

Pictures Don't Tell the Whole Story

Great design won't make the whole presentation (though it does help). One also needs to know the material and engage the audience. It is important to insure that your intent and your audience's expectations match. If your audience is expecting to share their knowledge, you had better have space in your agenda to let them share their wealth. It is also important to know how to moderate and facilitate the discussion so that one participant doesn't monopolize the conversation. You want your participants to leave your session just like they would leave a great restaurant:  satisfied, yet still wanting more. Rather than handing out doggy bags you can indicate that participants can talk to you after the session if they need more information.

Is it stealing?

One of the things that I love about Web 2.0 is how free many folks are with their information and expertise. I've been researching how to assist people when researching on the internet. For me that has lead me down many other paths--I was the type of student who could spend hours looking up one word in the dictionary, because I found so many other interesting words on my way to the one I wanted/needed.  But I digress. 


Researching on the Internet
I've been tooling around today over on the NICHCY website. I've always turned to NICHCY for information on early intervention and special education. They've also got some great information on sharing or disseminating information and how to research.
Steal This!
The section I love the most, is their page called steal these dissemination strategies. They have model language for social media policies, Facebook posts and tweets and they encourage sharing, re-purposing and linking like this.
So I don't think it's stealing if it is encouraged, but I love that it is encouraged! What do you steal--or shall I say repurpose?  And do you make sure to mention where you originally found your material?

Expanding your Reach

In my last post I wrote about developing a communications plan as part of a membership drive. I took the time to look at my Facebook friends (612) and then I made a list of the Facebook friends of each of the board members who are administrators for the fanpage for the board I sit on. I subtracted our mutual friends, and then added up all of the potential followers we could pick up.

Potential Facebook Followers
Our potential number of followers was 2500!  2500! Wow! Even if we added only 10% of that number to our membership rolls, we could significantly up the number of members. But knowing that we had a potential universe of 2500 new members that isn't enough.

Maximizing Our Reach
We needed specific strategies. After some thought, I came up with a template for all future blog posts. As part of the development of a blogpost, I would also develop a few sample Facebook status updates and a few sample tweets. Each Board member could then be emailed a link to the latest blog post, a copy of the sample status updates and tweets and asked to post to their own pages, other pages they administer and to the timelines of their friends.

Will it Work?
Well, only time will tell. As of this writing I have one-third of the board following the plan, and we've already seen visits to our blog jump exponentially. We clearly need to stick to our plan, and remember that the outcome isn't visits to the blog, it is membership in our organization. 

Creating a Communications Plan

One of the board's I sit on is reevaluating how it is communicating with its membership. To be honest, that makes it sound like we've been communicating. Unfortunately, we've been too busy doing, to communicate. However, we know that we cannot grow or really be successful if we don't stop for a bit and think about how we communicate.

Self-Assessment
We are using our communications campaign as an adjunct to our membership recruitment campaign. Our first step was to survey our current members so that we could have a better idea of who are members are and what they need from the organization. We also asked them if they had interacted with our website, Facebook fanpage, twitter stream or our website. We then looked at our organization's stated mission and compared that to our current membership.


Making a Plan
The next step was to decide on our outcome. Our communications outcome is to increase membership. We needed to decide how we could use our communication strategy to increase membership. Now I'm  not going to give the particulars of our plan, but we decided that we needed a calendar that identified topic areas for each month, then we needed to insure that our information was posted across our different sites. 


Wait we aren't all proficient with social media
We needed to take a step back. It turns out we needed to go over how to do effectively use each of our media sites. We needed to learn how to use the sites as ourselves and as the organization. We needed to prepare primers on how to use each site. We also needed to have a short campaign to show the board how to share information across platforms.