How to Make the Most out of Your Visual Storytelling Artefacts
As a visual storytelling expert, I’ve had the privilege of working with businesses across many industries to create thousands of illustrated artefacts—each one tailored to capture the essence of their goals, stories, or strategies. These artefacts, whether they are live scribes, explainer videos, journey maps, strategy maps, or icon sets are all designed to be engaging, memorable, and meaningful to their particular audience.
Over the years, I’ve been thrilled to see how organisations use these creations: a graphic recording framed and proudly displayed in a boardroom, an explainer video integrated into induction training, or a strategy map that teams physically congregate around to raise questions and discuss progress on a weekly basis.
But I often wonder: Are all businesses extracting as much value as they could from these visual stories?
Visual storytelling artefacts are investments that can keep delivering value long after their initial creation—if you know how to leverage them. Here are some ways to unlock their full potential and ensure they continue to support your business goals.
- Live Scribes: From Wall Art to Digital Assets
A live scribe—a graphic recording created in real time—captures the energy and insights of an event in a unique, visual format. While it’s gratifying to see these works framed and hung on walls, there are countless other ways to extend their value:
- Digitise and Enhance: Scan the scribe and create a digital version. This allows you to share it with remote teams, include it in reports, or integrate it into presentations. It also allows other prints to be created so the poster can live in multiple locations at once.
- Re-draw and Repurpose: Consider having the scribe re-drawn digitally. This not only allows for tweaks and updates but also opens up new applications, like printing it on merchandise (mouse mats, t-shirts, or notebooks) or incorporating it into promotional materials.
- Turn It Into an Explainer Video: The process of drawing can be captured and transformed into a dynamic explainer video. Adding narration over the animated images appearing before your very eyes, pen stroke by pen stroke brings the story to life and draws the audience in. Which brings me to my next point…
- Explainer Videos: Amplify and Share
Explainer videos are incredibly versatile tools, explaining your ideas to your audience step by step as if you’re right there drawing it ‘on the back of the napkin’ for them. But they need to be seen to be effective. Simply hosting them in one location isn’t always enough.
- Direct Outreach: Identify the stakeholders or audiences who would benefit most and email the video directly to them.
- Social Media Sharing: Post your video on platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, or Instagram. Public hosting makes it shareable and broadens its reach.
- Embed it in Your Communication Plans: Integrate the video into broader comms or marketing initiatives, such as employee onboarding, customer / employee / partner training, or marketing campaigns. Consider placing it on your website or in email signatures for continuous visibility.
- Journey Maps: A Decision-Making Tool
Quite often what comes out of the scribed conversation works perfectly when reshuffled and set against a timeline. It doesn’t usually come out in perfect sequential order in the first draft and you need to invest in a second pass to get it into a the form of a journey map. But it is well worth the investment. Journey maps are powerful tools for visualising customer or employee experiences and bringing your audience ‘on the journey’. But making them, sticking them on the wall and forgetting about them isn’t enough.
- Keep Them Accessible: Make sure your journey maps are visible and easy to find, whether that’s on a shared digital platform, printed and displayed in key decision-making spaces – or ideally, both.
- Update Them Regularly: As your business evolves, revisit the map and make adjustments to reflect new insights or changes.
- Use Them in Meetings: Incorporate journey maps into workshops, planning sessions, or reviews to keep your team aligned and focused on customer or employee experiences.
- Strategy Maps: Make Them Central to Your Team’s Rituals
Similar to a journey map, a strategy map can easily emerge from a scribed conversation with a little extra time and distillation of information. A strategy map or “story on a page” distills your organisation’s vision into a single, compelling image. However, its power diminishes if it’s presented once and then forgotten.
- Keep It Visible: Print large versions and display them in offices or digital dashboards where teams can see and reference them daily.
- Incorporate Into Rituals: Use the map during team stand-ups, planning sessions, or retrospectives to ground discussions in the larger strategy.
- Extend the Metaphor: Build complementary tools off the strategy map. For example, if your map depicts an airport scene, create “boarding passes” for team members to outline their behavioural commitments or milestones for the journey.
- Engage the Right People in the Design Process
One of the most effective ways to boost the long-term value of visual storytelling artefacts is to include the right stakeholders in the design process from the beginning. Bring in representatives from communication and marketing teams, key project leads, and individuals from various departments who understand the broader organisational context. Their input ensures that the things you are making are not only accurate but also relevant and adaptable for multiple uses. By engaging broadly upfront, you’ll create assets that are more aligned with your team’s needs and more widely embraced across the organisation.
- Creative Ways to Extend the Value once you have the artefact
- Interactive Workshops: Use visual artefacts as starting points for interactive team workshops. For example, a strategy map could lead to brainstorming sessions where teams identify their roles in achieving the broader goals.
- Educational Materials: Adapt visuals into training manuals, e-learning modules, or FAQs to reinforce key messages for new hires or customers.
- Gamification: Turn your visual artefacts into games or challenges. For instance, a journey map could inspire a scavenger hunt or quiz to reinforce understanding of key steps.
- Campaign Themes: Use the visual style or metaphor from your artefact to inspire entire communication campaigns, keeping messaging cohesive and engaging.
- Feedback Loops: Share the artefacts with your team and invite feedback or contributions. A scribe could evolve into an interactive mural where employees add their ideas and insights over time.
The Case for Ongoing Value
Visual storytelling artefacts aren’t just one-time deliverables; they are dynamic assets with the potential to inspire, align, and educate over the long term. As a business leader, you’ve already invested in creating these tools—why not ensure they continue to work for you?
By keeping them visible, repurposing them creatively, and embedding them into your company’s workflows and culture, you can really dial up their impact and extract value far beyond the initial moment of creation.
So, take another look at the artefacts you’ve commissioned. Think about how they could live on—not just as static images, but as evolving, powerful tools for engagement and connection. And if you’re unsure how to start, let’s have a conversation. Together, we can find ways to keep your stories working for you.
After all, the best stories aren’t just told; they’re lived. And the best artefacts don’t just sit on a wall—they spark conversations, inspire action, and create lasting value.
