Thing #58: Tell Your Library Story with Infographics

Well, it's been a while since I posted to this blog. And even longer since I completed a Thing via Nebraska Learns 2.0.

I had been itching to try my hand at an infographic, so I thought I'd give it a whirl and complete Thing #58: Tell Your Library Story with Infographics while I was at it.

As the admin of the Facebook page Nebraska Librarians Learning Together, it's my job to post interesting and engaging content and to track the interaction on the page. The Facebook Insights from the page are the inspiration for today's infographic.

I went with visual.ly and created an account to use the online program. I then selected the Facebook Insights "template." This required me approving the visual.ly Facebook app. Here's the result (and see below it for my reactions):

So, how did visual.ly perform? Poorly (not at all), at first. I couldn't get the list of pages I admin to load. Remembering I was in Internet Explorer, I opened up the program in Firefox and didn't run into that snag.

What's great about this infographic? It shows the demographic profile of the page fans and demonstrates how the content is performing. However, there is one area of the infographic that's not completed (map of storytellers, breakout by gender, and possible names or other profile data about the "most likely" storytellers), and I'm not sure why, but I certainly can't use this infographic in an official report when there's missing data.

One thing about infographics that stands out to me: they're meant for online viewing. I guess I could put this on an 8.5" x 14" document, but who reads on that size paper anymore? If I shrink the length to fit 8.5" x 11", the print will probably be too small to read. It would be nice to be able to format the infographic to different dimensions for different kinds of use. Please note: I was unable to embed the html into this blog post because it was wider than the width of this blog post space (demonstration of this is at the end of this post),

All in all, visual.ly is a good program, easy to use once you find the right internet browser. I look forward to trying out the different templates given the various data I work with on a day-to-day basis.

The html-embedded infographic (See? It overflows to the right because of the width of my blogging space):

create infographics with visual.ly