This is the second part of three part series about Media and the use for NGOs in their communication. Read the first part here.
Last week i was writing about the visual language and how we can use it to deliver different messages in our NGO work. Today is the next step. While last week it was more or less about visual media in general, i wanna look in todays post into the different types of media we have to tell the stories we want to tell. I will not exclusively talk about visual media as i think the other forms we have are powerful as well and it would be stupid to forget about them. So let’s jump right into it.
A lot of the communication an NGO is doing is coming through words, if it is at presentations, the brochures or the website. The written has still a big part in the form of communication. In my mind it has a couple of advantages. First: It could easily be adjusted to the needs of the story. With a photograph you might be missing in the story you can’t really reproduce it easily. Words at the same time ‘only’ need the knowledge and the experience to tell the story (leaving beside a general discussion about quality of storytelling). This means it is a easy to use way to communicate a story. At the same time the reader has to trust the words. A photograph, audio interview or videoclip is testimony that is (tough still subjective) in our perception closer to the truth. But, and this is also important, it is easier to draw a picture of complex situations or stories with words than with a photograph or the single perspective of one interview. With the use of the internet, in my opinion, also the way of how we consume has changed a lot. Long texts on NGO websites might be read only by few as the whole way of consuming content got way more visual in the last years.
The closest to written words is for sure audio. It brings us a level of personal story that written words can hardly have. It also influences us emotionally way more than written words normally do. A big plus for 90% of the stories NGOs want to tell as most of the impact on people their stories have is on an emotional base. We get more of a certain person or some atmosphere sounds as well. It brings us more in the scene. It is not said for nothing that audio is in film 50% of the quality. Once watch a film without the sounds, i think it is crazy how fast you loose track of the story. At the same time audio is good adjustable in the editing of the direction of stories for instance.
Photography has been widely used by NGOs. The quality might be very different, but the visual testimony of the situations and projects is a powerful tool. The biggest amount of people are visual learners. At same time photography is so powerful because it is static in one way, but that allows also the viewer to take time, wander around in the picture. The situation is not changing, it gives time to build an emotional relationship. The viewer is able to find his own way into the story and through it. It is a testimony of a certain moment that try to tell the story. At this is also the point, why high quality photography can be so much more powerful in the impact on people. We are used to a huge amount of visual impact each day and a lot of photography is filled up with certain amount of related stories in our heads. That makes photography a very powerful emotional tool. One of the disadvantages of photography is one of it’s powerful abilities. It is only capturing one specific moment. Photoessays are one way to get over that problem.
Classic videostories about projects have always been a good way to share stories. It combines audio, moving images and the moving image is directing the viewer through the story. This is a huge difference to photography, not only because of the audio, but also because of the clear direction of the viewer. One could argue that photography can also direct the viewer with lines , light/shade and so on, but still video is faster, not giving so much time for the viewer and the moving part of the image has a huge power to draw the attention of the viewer. Used rightly it can have a huge impact on the knowledge side, but powerful photography might have the higher emotional impact.
The combination of more or less everything what i said above could be found in multimedia. Many photojournalists right now jump on the multimedia train with extending their photoessays with audio to tell stories more deeply. It combines the power of both audio and photography in one. It could be easy to produce, when you combine for instance an interview with a set of pictures, as well. High level multimedia is something different tough, when it combines atmosphere sound, interviews and music, fine tuned to the pictures. But thinking back of what said about photography and video, a combination of those two with powerful audio could be the most powerful way. It combines the advantages of photography (making the viewer explore the scene himself, higher emotional impact, and so on) with the ability to transmit knowledge and direct the viewer to certain parts of the story. What that brings, when used right, is complex, but also quite obvious. It is a combination of the most powerful storytelling tools that could be very fine tuned on delivering the message. There are other advantages in multimedia i will talk about in the last part of the series, so stay tuned.
In the last part, that will be online in two weeks, i will write about the different ways to use media and deliver. We came from the general thoughts on how we want to tell something to the forms of media we can use to tell that. So in the last part it will be about the use of what we produced to deliver our story/ message to possible donors.
