PICTURE THIS!
When we were children our books usually had more pictures than words. In fact, it was through pictures that we often learned to read books like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. Our little minds could only recognize and process a few words. The pictures, however, stimulated our creativity and helped us tell the story. And sometimes we made up our own story. As we grew older, the pages of our books lost their beautiful, colorful pictures and were filled with alphabets, punctuation and symbols. We could now read the story but the pages weren’t nearly as attractive or stimulating.
Now we’re all grown up. Many of our bookstores have gone out of business and daily news papers and monthly magazines have jumped on the online bandwagon. But in jumping on the online bandwagon, purveyors of information have resorted to their childhood training and resorted to copious and colorful images. They seem to have adopted the proverbial saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Paul Sciarra, Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp obviously knew this when they founded and launched Pinterest in March 2010. http://pinterest.com/about/
As a child, entomology was one of Silbermann’s hobbies. He collected bugs! But as an adult he realized that people collected lots of different things. “Even the books on people’s bookshelves say something about who they are” says Silbermann. The idea behind Pinterest was for people to express themselves and to discover things through their friends and families by attaching images and links to their very own online pinboards.
Many nonprofit organizations like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx ) and Operation Smile (http://www.operationsmile.org/index.html) have harnessed the power of Pinterest. Beyond providing another way to connect and share messages with a mass audience, “Pinterest also symbolizes our aspirations, displaying not [only] who we are, but who we want to be”, says Bianca Bosker, a technical editor for the Huffington Post. Bosker also points out that Pinterest’s success may lie in its ability to change the social media conversation from “look at me” to “look at this.” For nonprofit organizations “look at this” is a necessary part of the conversation. Pinterest is another way for nonprofits to ‘talk up’ their causes, events and activities and to keep donors and supporters informed through the wonderful world wide web of pictures. And Pinterest is a way for nonprofit organizations to make an indelible imprint on the minds of a highly visual society.
For a free consultation and more information on marketing and promoting your nonprofit organization call the HR4NON-PROFITS team at 630.830.4443 or visit our website at www.hr4nonprofits.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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Theresa Dear
