Using Comics to Persuade - and to Get Funding!

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 on page five of their handout.  Give people a handout, and they can't resist flipping ahead. The urge to read a comic is irresistible!  Especially during a meeting.  

Plus there's something about comics that catch people off guard! They're completely un-intimidating. They 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.   

My boss asked me read "Understanding Comics" and draw a comic for his proposal, which is probably one of the most awesome things I've been asked to do at work. Later I was able to attend the Graphic Medicine Conference, which is an great conference, even for people not working in medicine.  The people 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.

Epilogue: we got funding for the project.

The comic worked so well we decided to make another one to pitch an online Fellowship application.  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.  We already had all this information about the student in our databases.  Why did they have to fill it in, again and again?  Filling out our forms was like a time warp from the seventies.  Here's the comic that persuaded our sponsors to invest money in an online fellowship application: