Donor photos are one of the most valuable pieces of donor experience content a nonprofit can have.  After doing a recent customer photo shoot, I was thinking about how wonderful it was to connect with our customers and what a huge asset we had in the photos.

I often see nonprofits with the “shiny, happy people” stock photos and shudder.  There is such a huge opportunity for nonprofits to connect with their donors and volunteers through photography.

Use Photos to Increase Web Traffic:

A report from Curata not surprisingly suggests that bringing visual components to website content is key to boosting engagement, and ContentLEAD found that adding images to your pages can result in 47 percent more clicks than pages with text-only articles.  Use images that illustrate your story or further convey your mission, purpose and goals.

If you want to learn more about the value of adding photos and tips to improve your search engine optimization just watch Google’s related Webmaster Central video.

Use Visuals to Tell a Story:

Another form of visual content that has helped web content marketing campaigns is the infographic.

Infographics have become increasingly popular for organizations attempting to differentiate their website from others, or those trying to draw more people to their sites.  I would suggest that nonprofits start thinking about infographics for annual reports.  They are more sharable, easier to digest, and more affordable.

Here is a great example of an infographic for the new Sage Nonprofit Cloud Suite.

Use Photos to Enhance Social Media:

Nonprofit use of social media is growing by leaps and bounds.  You can see just how nonprofits are using social media in Mashable’s infographic. In the study they found that 92% of nonprofits are using at least one social media button.

Using Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest and other social networks do help nonprofits reach donors, but many NPOs are missing the opportunity to really leverage the networks.  Web Liquid recently found that 37% of users that saw visual content Liked the page, compared to 31% who saw video content, 27% exposed to text updates and 15% shown a link.  Pretty interesting!

Take-away: There are many ways to add visuals/images to your properties here are a few:

1. Add images to text content on your site.

2. Add photos of your employees, volunteers, and even your board members.  (Don’t use bad, grey headshots.)

3. Share images of your events on Facebook, Pintrest, or Google+.

4.Tweet photos from everything you do.

5. Capture photos of your donors and volunteers in action, just like we did!

1Thanks for the valuable info that helped build this post. http://contentlead.com/blog/put-a-face-to-your-small-business-name-with-visual-content-that-drives-clicks-and-leads