• Infographics turn complex data into compelling stories
• Designers of infographics should not emphasise graphics over information

In a world bombarded by information, choosing the right means of communicating with your customers is one of the most important aspects of corporate communication. In short, it is a key aspect to customer acquisition and satisfaction.

The means for communication in the current world may include word of mouth and publications that include posters, reports, static and interactive visualizations; videos and signs that are very depicted in cartoons. All these may be used to interact and connect with your particular audience at hand.

Like other colleagues in companies who are doing other core business tasks, the main task that we corporate communicators have is to paint positively the organisation image that helps to build trust in our services and products.

Corporate communicators must be so informed about the company’s operations so that they can communicate well with both internal and external audiences. The knowledge level about the company determines the means of communication we should use in any circumstance and type of content. We have seen how colleagues use press releases during crisis to avoid confusion or social media.

However, with all ways of communication, data visualizations or famously known as infographics have not been highly used to communicate with the targeted audiences.

Data visualization is mainly defined as a graphical representation of information or data by the use of visual elements like charts, graphs or maps. In infographics data are analysed well to the level of giving stories to the audience that can attract to take action.

Visualization is crucial for corporate communication because it gives the audience the need to refer to your message through the use of art (graphics) and data.

Why infographics in corporate communication?

Based on the report by the Research Gate, data visualization is the convenient way to facilitate communication than text at a large percent because the techniques employed in developing them convinces the audience to care about your service.

Visualisation may be the most effective way of communicating with your audience as it makes your message especially data easily understood and put them in a presentable way. It relieves the reader from boredom.

Visualisation makes the reader understand information faster than in words. This is because infographics are always in attractive pictures or explainer videos that convey the information faster than words. For that case the use of simple language in a visual should be closely considered.

With visualisation, we can communicate emotions and intensify the weight of information. Through visualisation we can show progress, lives and even wrong doing like water scarcity in particular locality that we are going to do Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects.

A picture is worth a thousand words — especially when you’re trying to find relationships and understand your data which sometimes include thousands or even millions of data points. You can benefit more from visualisation since it shows trends, patterns and outliers in a very open way.

The visualisation or infographics should emphasise information rather than graphics to ensure the message is well communicated. Most corporate communication officials approved infographics or visuals which emphasises more graphics than information which is not right.

Companies are constantly increasing their use of data and data literacy thanks to big data. The high demand of data within our companies and the public increases the demand of producing analysed data into more compelling communication format like infographics or dashboards.

I encourage you to invest time to learn both: how to interpret and understand charts and diagrams, as well as how to create effective data visualisations to communicate with your stakeholders and the general audience. There are short courses that can help you achieve that like the one we are offering at Nukta Africa.

For the last two years Nukta Africa has been training journalists and communication experts to use present their data stories in infographics to grab more attention.

Also, Nukta Africa has much potential in corporate companies because apart from training it provides Data visualisation services that can help you turn rich data into custom designed infographics. Our infographics turn complex research findings into compelling stories.

It also offers Digital storytelling training, storytelling for advocacy training and particularly consultancy services on media engagement that is useful to public Relations and communication departments and individual organization leaders who plan to increase engagement with the media.

Tulinagwe Malopa is the Communication and event management Lead at Nukta Africa. Reach her at tmalopa@nukta.co.tz