Recently, Econsultancy.com reported how The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had produced its annual (2014) letter, written by Bill Gates himself, as an interactive letter supported by poignant infographics, and as a result it doubled its reach. Last year, Cancer Research UK published their annual report as an animated infographic (see below). And very impressive it was too.
Both of those cases got me thinking: could I use the same idea for presenting a business case for a new fundraising/CRM database?
I thought of this because I have sometimes found that trying to distil what is really important and key in a business case in a simple and concise way can be very difficult. (And yes, okay, I know verbosity is one of my personal problems… but even so). We try to add Management Summaries and a list of key bullet points, spreadsheets with the key figures, even a few charts/graphs, but sometimes it still doesn't seem to be understood by all the people who matter.
So maybe an infographic could do the job better. It would ensure we really had to think about what the most important points are, as you can't have a 20 page infographic, and it would hopefully make it far more visible, easily digestible and, importantly, quick and easy to understand. If necessary, you could even have 3 or 4 infographics - say, one for the key business drivers, one for the benefits, one for resources and one for costs. I would still keep them as concise as possible but that might mean you didn't try to cram too much onto one infographic.
You might still need a full business case document to back this up, but when you only have a few minutes to persuade your manager or board of trustees just why you need a new CRM system and why it is going to cost just a tad more than you had originally thought, then maybe this could help.
Anyone want to try?
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CRUK Infographic
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