Using storytelling and comics to persuade

 It was a typical campus funding committee meeting.  Five people were on the agenda, asking for money for IT projects.  But instead of listening to the first pitch, everyone was reading the comic in their handouts.  Luckily it was our comic on why we needed better tools for graduate students.

There's something about comics that catch people off guard. They're completely un-intimidating and draw you in immediately.  They make you have real empathy towards towards the characters. Through our comic, we were able to make people immediately understand the problem we were trying to solve.  We were able to communicate a vision to non-design stakeholders and executive leadership to secure buy-in, resource allocation, and budget. 

When my boss asked me read "Understanding Comics" and draw a comic I thought it was one of the most awesome things I've been asked to do at work. Later I was able to attend the Graphic Medicine Conference.  The facilitators there really understood the concept of storytelling and the art of persuasion.  The stakes in medicine are super high... people can die if you don't explain things clearly.  So it was inspiring to see how they successfully used comics to train doctors, educate patients, and do a number of other things that might otherwise be boring to read.

This comic worked so well we decided to make another one to pitch an online Fellowship application.  For students, filling out the application form was torture.  You had to enter your name and a lot of other data on every single piece of paper. Building off the idea that filling out our forms was like a time warp from the seventies, here is the comic that persuaded our sponsors to invest money in an online fellowship application: