We Have To Face Up To It
August 9th, 2007 | 
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By day, I work at a consulting firm that builds websites and runs online campaigns for environmental groups and other nonprofit organizations. And we have learned that what people look at on websites is other people — especially faces. We design around this phenomenon. If we want somebody to donate, we put a face next to the donate button. If we want somebody to sign a petition, we put a face next to the “sign our petition” link, etc…
Here’s an example (not my work) of a water-related website that really gets it: Take Me Fishing. Click around the website. Can you find a single page without a picture of somebody looking out at you? Grabbing your attention by gazing into your eyes? That’s good design.
This isn’t just a web thing. Jeff Brooks over at the Donor Power blog recently wrote a about a study that compared the response to two fundraising appeals about the genocide in Darfur. The results: potential donors responded more strongly to the image of a distressed girl and an emotional narrative about her personal struggle than they did to the very same picture and a factual narrative about how tens of thousands of people like her were suffering.
Nature protection and pollution control experts often communicate amongst themselves with numbers, figures, and statistics. Among experts, that’s fine. But when you want to reach beyond the inner circle, facts and figures have a secondary role to play. The primary thing you need to do is connect on a personal and emotional level — with images and anecdotes that your readers and listeners can relate to.
Posted in 2. FoolproofPhotos
This is so true! I learned this early on from the editor of my local newspaper; every time I sent him a story about what my watershed team is doing, he prints it along with a photo from his files of my volunteers in the river, DOING something, and engaging the camera. It gets attention — I don’t know if it’s because people want to see if they recognize the person in the photo or if it’s just a relatability thing. People relate to other people more than they do a lone rusty shopping cart recently hauled from the murky depths. They want to see that a person hauled it out! That helps ME make the connection for them: YOU can do what THIS person did.