Get the most value from your graphic recording – after your meeting
What’s the best thing to do with graphic recording images after a meeting? Use them! But how?
Meetings are a major investment in time and effort. You may have invited graphic recording to help you:
- inform* people about something,
- consult and get feedback,
- involve key groups in discussion or refining ideas,
- collaborate in decision-making, or
- empower groups about decisions that affect them.
*this model is the IAP2 Model of participation
Let’s keep that good work moving forward thoughtfully, so you can get the most value from the images. Here are some ideas, and a new offering:
Social media – let us help you amplify your message with your graphic recordings
You’ve heard “Create Once, Publish Everywhere”. You have your beautiful, brand new graphic recording images. It’s right after the event, and you know social media is still an incredible tool to a great tool to disseminate the info widely! But – do you need help optimizing the images for social? Too busy? We have a brand new offering: we can repackage your graphic recordings into bite-sized, social media ready content for you. We have three offerings to make it simple: bronze, silver and gold (with video slideshow). Click here for details.
Email images to participants – a gift after the meeting
For participants at a conference, receiving high-quality, inspirational visuals is a gift that sparks a memory of a special event. For internal teams, visual meeting notes are part of effective followup – graphic recording visuals might say what, so what, now what?
Emailing the images is a great excuse to reconnect after any event. Keep members/clients engaged, informed – and reinforce your call to action.
Inform via reports and newsletters
Almost every report or publication can be improved with a short, visual, high-impact summary. Visuals create an easy to understand summary of your report. It’s always effort well-spent if it helps people read the details. Useful for newsletters, annual reports, and magazines.
Involve: co-create visual strategic plans
Visuals make strategic plans, organizational charts, and visioning documents even more useful. When you invite graphic recording into the process, people can see themselves in the story. And since pictures create an emotional connection, they’re more likely to hang up a picture than a typed list. When people can see how their work is part of the big picture, it helps. Once you have the visual strategic plan – print it and distribute it. For remote teams, sending printed materials in the mail is a nice touch.
Collaborate: start a conversation with graphic recording
When we’re in person: Take the posters back to the office hallway, lunch room, or reception area – and hang them up. Ask people to add comments with post-it notes, or use them to spark a conversation.
When we’re online: upload them to a collaborative space like MURAL, and ask people to add comments with digital post it notes. Send people into breakout pairs/trios to talk about the images.
Get better feedback – with better presentations
Find exactly the right image for your organization – and reuse it in presentations. That’s right, we want you to use the images as much as you can! Instead of sharing a wall of text, help your audience understand key ideas by including visuals.
Feedback from a wider audience: professional publications
Professional publication ideas include: academic poster presentations, professional storyboards at conferences, magazines and journals. We’ve created graphic recordings as centrefold features, and illustrated key points in books. Graphic recording as methodology is an emerging field and many people are interested in how the process informs the research and results.
Consultation: bring people up to speed between meetings
Bring the images to the meeting with you! By seeing them again, you’ll be surrounded by colour and quotes from the initial session.
Sometimes, meetings are weeks or months apart. Or teams are geographically spread out, requiring multiple sessions, or teams alternate who attends quarterly sessions. Bring people up to speed by printing copies of the posters and placing it on their tables/chairs. In digital meetings, send a package for people to review electronically or have a slideshow of graphics before the meeting starts.
Collaborate to refine the content: create infographics based on the graphic recordings
Graphic recordings drawn by hand can be transformed into a refined, digital infographic. For example, a 3-day session can result in 200 square feet of images and content. You can select and refine this content to tell your story. Data visualization can be computer generated, hand-drawn, or both. One of our favourite services is to work with teams to create a summary visual, together – no drawing required on their part, but you truly direct the illustration. More buy in means more success.
Celebrate empowered teams: create keepsake materials
Celebrate your successes! These days you can print on anything. My clients have printed a strategic planning visual on a plant pot for an “evergreen” document, made them into calendars, notebooks, thank you cards, puzzles, and framed prints. But overall, graphic recordings are also about the “process” and not just the “product”. So not every image will make a beautiful print – but sometimes teams get excited to print the pictures even if we think it’s “messy!”