Picture this - a new idea for creating visuals each week
Our first post of many. We'll make this public so you all get an idea of what is coming up, to help you decide whether it is worth your time and money.
I could have started this series with one of the key tools, one that will help you with your visual marketing in a big way.
If so, I would probably have chosen Canva.com.
It has a free version as well as a paid-for version. And, for my charity readers, it lets you use the full paid-for version for free.
It is drag and drop, and comes with heaps of free templates, graphics and photos to incorporate in your designs.
But I want to give you a taste of some of the less well-known tools that I still think will be useful to you, and might even delight you. Don't worry - I'll come back to Canva in future issues, and possibly more than once, to highlight some of its particular strengths.
Break Your Own News
So, the first visual resource I'll share with you is a light-hearted one. And it's free of course.
Image of Break Your Own News by Jonathan Cresswell
Break Your Own News lets you create an apparent screenshot of a breaking news item - and you get to choose what that news is!
• Upload an image (that is yours to upload of course)
• write a headline
• write a news ticker to appear underneath
Then download your creation so you've got a copy for sharing to other networks.
TIP: I always recommend keeping a copy yourself of any image or video you create, just in case a tool's sharing functions don't work well or complete.
Or use the share to Facebook and imgur buttons to post it.
Note that the image includes a watermark of the breakyourownnews.com URL. So you're not going to convince many people that you are really going viral. But it's a bit of fun.
The tool is free, so you never know when it might no longer be available. So, if you can see some ways of using it, I suggest you don't hang around.
It is the work of Jonathan Cresswell who has created a few other quirky tools along these lines.
So, how will you use Break Your Own News?
Howard Lake
@howardlake
17 April 2020
Copyright 2020 Fundraising UK Ltd.