VisualsSpeak blog

Christine and I were inspired by something we read recently about how to involve a community of people and businesses in donating to non-profits doing exceptional work. This is what we came up with. Your input about our approach would be greatly appreciated.

We are inviting the VisualsSpeak Community to donate to a good cause. And it won’t cost you a cent!

Send us your VisualsSpeak story and we will make a contribution to Mercy Corps. This Portland, Oregon based group has a global perspective. Presently they are contributing their resources to relief in China and Myanmar after the recent disasters there.

This is a Win-Win-Win scenario:

• You win - Your story is converted into dollars and then contributed to an organization doing great work on a global level.
• VisualsSpeak wins - We get your great stories to share with current and potential community members.
• Mercy Corps wins - They receive money from our community to help continue their great work.

About Mercy Corps

Mercy Corps works amid disasters, conflicts, chronic poverty and instability to unleash the potential of people who can win against nearly impossible odds. Since 1979, Mercy Corps has provided $1.5 billion in assistance to (more)

The Details

Send us a story* about something that happened while using VisualsSpeak. This might be about a time when there was a significant breakthrough, or something unusual happened, or new insights were inspired, or anything you think others might want to hear.

Include as much detail as possible such as:

• Who was the audience?
• What was the purpose of the process?
• Where did this take place?
• How did your participants respond?

Please include the following information about yourself: (as much as you like)

• Name
• Title/ Profession
• Company/ Organization
• Website/ Blog
• Digital Photograph (or where we can find one on the web)

How to send your story

• Leave your story as a comment on our Blog post “What’s your story?”
• Send a separate email to info at visualsspeak dot com

Show me the money!

• VisualsSpeak LLC will donate $10.00 per story
• Christine & Tom will personally contribute $10.00 per story for a total of $20 per story
• $300.00 total potential donation! (15 stories)
• Donations to be tabulated on June 18, 2008

Why?

We believe in giving back. And one of the ways to give back is to support organizations doing great work. There’s not enough time in a day to do everything, so contributing to groups that benefit us all makes sense.

* By sending your story to VisualsSpeak, you agree to give us permission to use it in various ways including but not limited to our website, Blog, and marketing materials.

Thanks for your story and for supporting an incredible organization like Mercy Corps!

More often in life, making a difference is about all of the small steps we take along the way.

Yours in service,

Christine Martell & Tom Tiernan
VisualsSpeak LLC

Getting Tough on Time Limits Narrowing image choices may create visual bias. When the choice of images is narrowed down, a specific person’s visual bias may be inserted into the process. In choosing the final 200 photos for the VisualsSpeak ImageSet, Christine and I, with the input of many people, made conscious choices about which images were going to be in the set. We knew that our visual bias would be in the set and we did as much as possible to minimize the impact. Every person sees the world differently. There’s no way of getting around that. The key to any process is to get as much of ourselves, as the facilitator, out of the process as we can.

Photograph © Tom Tiernan

The key to the VisualsSpeak Process The key to the process is setting time limits for how long you give your participants to choose and assemble their images into a collage. There, I just gave away our ’secret sauce’. (I hope Christine will forgive me.)