Date: October 18th, 2006

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Dear readers,

Let’s face it. Advocacy reports are often tedious to read. Too much text, and too few graphics. Most readers only have time for the executive summary (we are all executives nowadays!), and a 20-second browse through the main body of the report. What a pity! How can we make them more appealing? How can we capture our readers' imaginations, and imprint a lasting message in their minds?

Three groups of professionals would have a lot to teach us: graphic designers, sociologists, and advertisers. All are forced to present their messages in appealing ways. A lot of focus is of course placed on improving the text of their information products. However they all make an effective use of graphical representations to communicate in powerful, evocative, thought-provoking ways, including: maps, photos, infographs, and even cartoons. Why can't we copy some of their ideas?

In this newsletter, we propose six examples of graphical illustrations you can use alongside or within your advocacy reports to get your messages across more efficiently: we hope they will provide you with useful inspiration!


1. INA's infographics
See: http://www.princeton.edu/~ina/infographics/
INA is a project of Princeton University's Sociology Department. They use network language and methods to represent global problems, such as the global arms trade or potential water wars, in original and informative ways. The artwork was done by graphical designer Jonathan Harris (http://www.number27.org/). He uses an assemblage of photos, statistical tables, text boxes, and colour-code maps to create an information-packed and beautiful poster-page which really grabs your attention, and gets you thinking and exploring. We preferred these two:
http://www.princeton.edu/~ina/infographics/weapons.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~ina/infographics/water.html

We contact Jonathan, to ask him for his advice on producing evocative images. In his words:
" For these maps, the idea was to make these major world issues as compelling as possible -- to tell stories with images and typography instead of tables and lists. Several ideas that resonate for me in my work are:
- simplicity
- meaning
- playfulness"

Jonathan pointed us towards his latest work, in particular, We Feel Fine (http://wefeelfine.org), a study of human emotion, and the Time Capsule (http://timecapsule.yahoo.com), made for Yahoo! and launched last week. If you want to post your thoughts or photos to the time capsule, you still have a few days left!


2. Human Rights Watch: "Darfur Drawn".
See: http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/
On mission along the border of Chad and Darfur, Human Rights Watch researchers gave children notebooks and crayons. The children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the militias, the bombings by government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages... Authorities may often deny your conclusions, question your evidence, attack your credibility, accuse you of bias. But children’s drawings have an innocence which gives them a strong credibility and makes them harder to deny.


3. True Majority's Oreo animation
See: http://www.truemajority.org/oreos/ (may take some time to download but its worth the wait)
True Majority uses a simple Oreo cookie analogy to show the imbalance between military spending and social spending in the United States budget, and also shows that this huge military spending isn't even necessary. It uses a cartoon animation, which is narrated by the founder of Ben & Jerry ice cream company. But you do not necessarily need to produce a cartoon or call on a celebrity: the main issue here is finding an evocative analogy which will grip your reader and make your case real to him or her. A good analogy should be simple and faithful to your message.


4. Survival International's "there you go" slideshow
See: http://www.survival-international.org/thereyougo.php
Survival International uses an online humorous slideshow to show that indigenous people are actually quite OK without "sustainable development". We really enjoyed watching it, and hope you will too. You don't necessarily need flashy software to do this - Powerpoint will do the trick and can even be saved as an online presentation.


5. AAAS: using satellite imagery
See: http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/0530zim.shtml
AAAS has used satellite images of farm destruction in Zimbabwe to support a report made by Amnesty International and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), based in Harare. Human rights monitoring through an eye in the sky! Of course we do not all have access to satellites, but you get the message: a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words.


6. MapleCroft interactive maps
See: http://maps.maplecroft.com/
Maplecroft has produced an outstanding collection of interactive world maps, available online (you may need to download a Flash plug-in). These maps tackle topics like: displacement, child labour, conflict risk, corruption, hunger, human rights risk:
- Each map uses a simple colour-code which clearly shows the problem countries
- The maps also have case studies known as “hotspots”, “flashpoints” and “spotlights”, giving further information about each issue and profiling business engagement
- Each map has an “analysis” section, which is actually the narrative text-only report, but chopped into easily digestible sections
- On what data are these maps based? The sources are always publicly available and fully referenced and are often available online

How to make such a map? What steps are involved? Dr. Andrew Thow from Maplecroft shares some advice and pointers:

"We find that maps are excellent communication tools and much more engaging than text-based reports. Maps appeal to people in a special way and encourage interest at different levels and across a broad audience. Someone picks up a map, starts asking themselves questions about it and is immediately engaged and thinking about the issue.

We have found that almost any issue can be effectively mapped. Our maps focus on non-financial business risk and opportunity and are designed to help business manage, communicate and educate about the major challenges in society. The project involves the development of interactive electronic and hard-copy maps of risk and responsibility issues and their significance to business.

At the core of every map we produce is a unique risk management index that ranks each country on a scale of 0-10. The score is used to colour the maps, with different colours representing different ranges – usually extreme, high, medium and low risk. The indices and coloured maps act as a framework to hang other information on. For us, this includes geographically referenced case studies, background information and extensive analysis.

Our risk indices are derived from the most up to date and most respected data sources, usually UN agencies. To create the score for each country, we use a number of different indicators that relate to the issue of interest (the number depends on the complexity). These are then normalised to give a score for each country relative to the others and added together to give the final index value. We carefully adjust the weight of the different indicators in the final index depending on their importance and the robustness of the data.

Some issues make for fairly simple indices, while others are more complicated. For example, our Health and Safety map uses three indicators, while our Avian Influenza risk map has more than 30. For complex issues, such as human rights – where numeric data is not available – we painstakingly analyse qualitative information and use it to score countries individually. We find it is always best to include as many countries as possible and will omit datasets that do not offer good global coverage. The more countries there are, the higher the quality of the comparative analysis – we usually aim for 150 at least.

In addition to our publicly available and generic maps, we use the same principles to create bespoke applications to help organisations manage risk and responsibility. For example, we develop indices to measure and map risk and responsibility in companies’ supply chains by tailoring the index to meet the specific nature of their business principles and operations. We have also developed a human rights monitoring mechanism that can provide an overview of a company’s human rights risk in their operations and countries of operation around the world. The tool uses the information contained in our human rights index, combined with specific information supplied by the company about the nature and location of their operations, as well as their perception of human rights risk in those operations, to predict the risk of human rights violations in the future."

If you have more questions for Andrew and his colleagues at Maplecroft, you are welcome to contact them at info@maplecroft.net.


We are coming to the end of this issue. We encourage you to explore the examples above, and apply some of them to your own advocacy work. Some pointers which may be useful:

- Start by identifying and refining your key messages until they are cristal-clear. If you cannot express each message in a simple, short and unambiguous sentence, then continue working on it.
- Make sure you have the necessary facts to support your messages.
- Focus on your target audience: what kind of people are they? What is likely to get their attention?
- Once you have done all of this, brainstorm for different ideas for communicating your message: theater, maps, graphs, individual stories, whatever it takes.

You may also want to visit the "Advocacy and reporting" section of our toolbox, where you can find a selection of top manuals:
http://www.humanrightstools.org/dir/1__Monitoring_-_Documentation_-_Advocacy/Advocacy_and_reporting/

We hope you read and enjoyed this newsletter as much as we enjoyed writing it, and that it will provide you with ideas and inspiration. Now, its your turn to hit the keyboard:
- Let us know of imaginative ways you have found to communicate advocacy messages! We love to hear from you!
- Share this message with friends of colleagues who work on human rights advocacy, and do not hesitate to post it to your newsletter or blog.



Best regards,

Daniel D'Esposito, editor
Human Rights Tools
editors@humanrightstools.org
http://www.humanrightstools.org


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