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Customer Story
For Larissa Crockett, Executive Director of a Maine-based affordable housing nonprofit, Neighborhood Housing Trust, effective communication is crucial in addressing one of her community’s most pressing challenges: making housing accessible in Maine’s most expensive real estate market.
To connect with diverse stakeholders, from donors to community members, Larissa needed a tool that could translate complex housing information into engaging visuals. That’s where Piktochart came in.
Operating in Maine’s premium real estate market presented communication hurdles for Larissa’s organization. She and her team needed to reach audiences with varying levels of education and background knowledge, clearly explaining complex housing concepts and terminology.
Engaging stakeholders across different age groups, primarily those between 50 and 80 years old, required breaking through the digital information overload. Larissa also faced the challenge of breaking through information overload in digital spaces and creating consistent, professional communications with limited design resources.
“You have a lot of people coming with different reading levels, different educational levels, different backgrounds in the topic,” Crockett explains. “The real challenge is how to communicate your message to a very diverse group of stakeholders.”
Having previously used Piktochart for community engagement and newsletter graphics during her time as a municipal manager, Larissa knew its potential. When she transitioned to nonprofit management, she brought this valuable tool with her, expanding its use across multiple channels.
“I use Piktochart often for Facebook content, Instagram content. I really appreciate that I can go into Piktochart, and it already has things sized for me. So I don’t need to be creating an image and then try to figure out how to smoosh it into Instagram size or Facebook size.”
The platform’s intuitive interface and efficient features have proven particularly valuable: “Being able to just go in and create within the template is super efficient and very easy,” notes Crockett.
By implementing Piktochart, Larissa saw significant improvement across her organization’s communications strategy. Most notably, audience engagement skyrocketed.
“I think that we can say honestly that Piktochart is one of the reasons why that has been more successful because it’s helping to create more engaging content.”
Piktochart significantly improved operational workflow and team efficiency for Larissa’s team. Pre-sized templates for various social media platforms and easy brand color management streamlined content creation, freeing up valuable time.
Additionally, the platform’s intuitive design has been particularly beneficial for team collaboration and training. “It’s very intuitive to use,” Crockett emphasizes. “It’s really a click and click and click, and they can just figure out what to do very quickly. I’ve worked with a lot of interns… and it’s very efficient for me to say to an intern, ‘Okay, this is our Piktochart account. Here’s the templates that I’ve opened up and branded. Go.'” This ease of use extends to integration with other tools like Constant Contact, creating a seamless workflow for their communications needs.
Perhaps most importantly, Piktochart allowed Larissa’s organization to maintain professional-grade communications without needing specialized design expertise – a huge advantage for a nonprofit organization with limited resources for technical training.
“I can see that Adobe InDesign is really amazing… but it’s a level of design that I am never going to take the time to master and learn,” Crockett admits. “I can make something look decent and look good on Piktochart without having a degree in graphic design.”
This democratization of design capabilities enabled Larissa to maintain consistent, professional communications across all their channels despite ongoing resource constraints.
One standout project demonstrates the platform’s versatility: a digital business directory featuring the organization’s donors.
“As a thank you to them last year, I created a digital little booklet of shopping options for people that we sent out to all of our donors,” Crockett shares. “We’ve got the really nice graphics that I was able to do within Piktochart and then partner up with my Adobe subscription and getting everything hyperlinked, posting that up so that people could just click on something to go and shop online to those businesses that had supported us.”
The resulting interactive PDF, combining attractive graphics with hyperlinks to donor businesses, created a win-win situation. It not only acknowledged her supporters but also encouraged continued community engagement – all thanks to Larissa’s vision.
Crockett emphasizes several key strategies for maximizing Piktochart’s potential. She encourages users: “Be comfortable using the templates and adapting them as works for you. If you see a template that you like the elements of but the colors are wrong, change the colors. If you see a template that you like the color scheme of, but the elements don’t really suit you, remove the elements, keep the color base.”
Larissa also recommends focusing on simplicity by removing unnecessary elements to create cleaner and more impactful designs. This, combined with saved color palettes, helps her team maintain brand consistency and adapt content for different platforms while maintaining visual coherence.
After eight years of using Piktochart, Crockett continues to find new ways to leverage the platform for her organization’s communication needs. The tool has become an integral part of their strategy to make affordable housing more accessible and understood in their community.
Through Piktochart, the organization has found a way to bridge the gap between complex housing information and public understanding, proving that effective visual communication can play a crucial role in addressing community challenges.
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