Cultivating creative partnerships

A distributed data viz team

infogr8 is a visual data storytelling studio based in London, UK. They’ve created interactive visualizations and infographics for clients such as Spotify, World Health Organization, Mars Petcare, and the Greater London Authority.

Developing bespoke visualization solutions requires a unique team of specialists; rather than a fixed team, they have a global distributed network consisting of strategists, designers, journalists, BI developers, analysts, and data engineers.

One of the drawbacks of this model is that it poses resourcing challenges and the infogr8 team expressed difficulty with forming teams quickly for their client briefs. It was clear they needed a solution that would make the resourcing process much easier.

infogr8 has worked with many talented collaborators over the years and some have lost touch with the team. The solution needs to maintain and strengthen ties with past and current collaborators. We don't have to look far to solve this, the answer lies in the problem.

Since email is the primary channel of communication to invite talent to join projects, then email is the solution.

In brief, here are the solutions I implemented:

• Designing a brand new newsletter that serves the talent network
• Building the email list from scratch
• Curating content to be published on a consistent basis

The Talent page on the infogr8 website is one of the most important touchpoints for a new collaborator to join the team. I shifted the call-to-action from a contact form to a newsletter sign-up form, which led to about 10x more conversion—there is naturally a lower barrier for a email sign up compared to a contact form.

It’s daunting to see the big fat zero in the subscriber count. How do you grow this list? The easiest place to start with is to ask people you know. I emailed all of our existing and past collaborators and encouraged them to share this with their network. In addition, I regularly asked new people I met to join and posted in various Slack communities when we had a new email go out. We quickly hit 50 subscribers within the first couple of months and 100 within six.

What’s a newsletter without content? There are two types: created and curated content. For our target audience, curating relevant news made the most sense as it’s hard to keep up with the latest.

Although curation doesn’t require you to create new content, it is very demanding of your time to find news-worthy updates to share. Good curation means having a good eye to discern what your audience cares about and also building a process to collect news. I was already embedded in the data viz community so I already follow the right people. To ensure I wasn’t missing anything important, I blocked off every Monday in my calendar to catch up on updates from my community and save them in a central document.

What makes newsletters particularly helpful compared to other mediums is that you can quickly see which links had the highest clicks. This behavioral data informs you on the type of content that resonates with your subscribers, allowing you to be responsive to their interests.

It has been an exciting challenge to build a newsletter that serves infogr8 collaborators. While it was certainly rewarding, it was difficult inventing a process to maintain a consistent publishing rhythm.

To date, the newsletter has been an excellent avenue to connect with the wider data viz community as we keep them up-to-date about the latest infogr8 news. We have established ourselves as a friendly member of the community and formed many new relationships with talent through the newsletter.