For many nonprofits, a budget for digital marketing doesn’t exist. So that means that hiring a graphic designer is not an option. But what if I told you that you did not need to spend a dime on creating visual content for your nonprofit? That all you needed was 30 minutes and internet access to create pictures and videos that will help your nonprofit to standout on the web. You’d probably think I’m lying, right? Wrong. There is a plethora of websites and applications that provide free tools to create images. After all, people are 65% more likely to remember a piece of information if a visual is paired with it (Brain Rules).
Canva
Canva is an easy drag-and-drop design tool to create graphics for web or print with over 1 million stock photos, shapes, and fonts. You can also add your own images for further customization. Canva is available through their website and on the App Store if you own an Apple product. Canva also offers their premium version for free for nonprofits (a $155 value) as well as helpful tutorials in creating content.
Pablo
Pablo is strictly for designing social media posts (Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook only). It is a drag-and-drop tool that gives you access to over 600,000+ stock photos with the ability to upload your photos and logo. In comparison to Canva, Pablo is limited in its ability. But for people who get overwhelmed easily or just want something simple and clean, Pablo is great.
Piktochart
For those of you shying away from infographics, they are not going away. In fact, you might want to start utilizing them more often, because it’s been found that infographics are shared and liked three times more than other visual content (Mass Planner). Piktochart makes it incredibly easy to create an infographic. You can make presentations and printables as well, making it an amazing all around tool. The only downside to the free version of Piktochart is that there are limited templates, the images are watermarked, and only saved as JPG or PNG files. However, Piktochart does offer a discount for nonprofits for their PRO version.
Infogr.am
If you can get the hang of Piktochart, another infographic tool that is very popular is Infogr.am. Infogr.am is a bit more advanced, however the features are out of this world. You can embed YouTube videos in infographics and even create animations. There is a premium version ($228 annually) with additional features, but there is a discount that nonprofits qualify for.
