by Colleen Doyle

Recently, the TMNcorp team encountered an interesting communications challenge while developing a public awareness campaign on school bus safety. Feedback from focus group testing of parents of teens indicated that parents weren’t responding as expected to the safety messaging regarding bus ridership.

The parents liked the more creative, tongue-in-cheek concepts, but they weren’t compelling enough to prompt a change in their behavior. The more direct messaging turned off some parents who perceived the concepts as dark, preachy or overly dramatic.

As the saying goes, “information is power.” We knew we had compelling statistics on our side. So we turned to informational graphics to communicate in such a way that  left parents thinking about the facts represented, and not questioning the credibility of the claims.

So, why do these increasingly popular tools for communicating complex concepts work so well? Here are four key reasons:

Informational graphics are compelling. They aren’t supplemental décor to play up a message—they ARE the message. When a story is visually mapped in this way, it invites a bit of decoding and interpretation through scanning over reading. This method of communicating information is more dynamic than traditional copywriting.

Informational graphics inform quickly. Narratives are reduced to statistics and coupled with simple graphics for greater context. For those with short attention spans (a growing population), narratives aren’t an ideal way to communicate. Complex processes can be represented at a glance and understood easily by those who wouldn’t have invested the time in reading paragraphs of the verbal equivalents.

Informational graphics use symbolism. Symbolism not only transcends language barriers, but also supersedes written language in its ability to communicate well. When information is symbolically represented, the viewer has a greater understanding of what the information means in terms of context, ratio and proportion.

Informational graphics don’t preach. For audiences looking for “just the facts,” informational graphics can motivate through easier to digest methods. As a result, they are more commonly received as factual in nature than their marketing counterparts.

Credibility is what inspired the TMN team to use informational graphics for this campaign. See videographic below:

Others rely on them to simplify complex information, transform straightforward information into something more creative, or visualize a process.

Simply put, informational graphics are effective because of their ability to show rather than tell.  They may take more creative effort, but the result is messaging that is more likely to be remembered and shared.