Day at Brevard Zoo: What Makes the Visit So Enjoyable

A diamond in the rough. That was our description of a day at Brevard Zoo in an earlier post. That article highlighted the Zoo’s great advantages from the customers’ perspective.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible to others.

Jonathon Swift

In this post, we will use an interview we did with Keith Winsten the Director of the Brevard Zoo. Our objective? To go ‘backstage’ and understand the secret enablers behind the zoo’s success. The secrets are invisible to most customers. The secrets that created the advantages are the ones that customers appreciate the most.

Finger Lakes Getaways … the Best Wineries to Visit

We will not use the usual interview format. Instead, we will summarize our discussion with the director by topic. In this way, we can add our impressions and not depend on just the direct answers to questions.

Note to readers … the Brevard Zoo is not and has never been a customer of Digital Spark Marketing.

Let’s get started:

Well-rounded mission

Keith describes the Zoo’s mission as multifaceted. Of course, there is the recreation and leisure role as a component of Brevard’s tourism industry. Probably not the component that draws people to Brevard. But, certainly a good draw to return.

The Zoo’s mission begins with education. The main target audience for this mission is 9-12-year-old children. The Lagoon Quest section of the Zoo is dedicated to this audience. Targeted for a more detailed education experience are the ‘at risk,’ Title One kids, who come and spend multiple weeks of the year at the Zoo attending Zoo School.

During this part of their school year, the teacher and children learn their school curriculum in the Zoo setting. The goal for this group? Being exposed to the environment and wildlife to make a different in these children’s lives about how they view their impact on their world around them. This is probably the Zoo’s most important mission in our opinion.

The second aspect of the Zoo’s mission is participation. Zoo School is a great example of how people can participate in learning about the environment and wildlife. This theme of education and participation is also implemented in many other areas of the Zoo for general Zoo guests. In fact, the Zoo is known for its ability to create unique and interactive amazing guest experiences.

A third important mission, as is with most zoos, is the animal conservation role. In this role, the Zoo’s staff is reaching out as much locally, as regionally and internationally, to provide their expertise and make an impact on local conservation and the environment.

The final mission is community engagement and a source of community pride. This Zoo has been envisioned, built, and managed to a significant degree by the community in Brevard. A colossal success … ranked No. 8 Zoo in the U.S. in 2012, as determined by a Trip Advisor survey and chosen by visitor response. A great source of pride for Keith, his team, the volunteers and, of course, the community at large.

Leadership and vision

Jonathon Swift once said that vision is the art of seeing things invisible to others. This statement certainly applies to Brevard Zoo and Keith Winsten’s leadership and permeates everywhere you turn at the Zoo.

The focus of the vision is to provide authenticity – a real life ability to interact with wildlife. This is a great objective that is visible throughout the Zoo.

Results like those on display just don’t happen. Someone, and usually more than one person, has the vision of what the future zoo should be. Just as important, though, is to have the skill and leadership to make it happen.

While we did not have the opportunity to speak with any of the staff we have spoken to some of the volunteers. In addition to his vision, the director’s ability to produce many leaders within his staff has contributed to the zoo’s success.

Day at Brevard Zoo … 20 seconds of courage

Ever see the movie We Bought a Zoo? It is a true story of how a family bought a failing zoo and, in doing so, rescued it. “You only need 20 seconds of courage” is a famous and significant plot line in the movie.

This mantra certainly applies to this zoo as well. Not because the zoo was failing, or rescued. It applies simply because of the ability of the director and his staff to have the belief in their vision and the courage to persevere and make the right decisions at the right time.

Adaptation and change

Following the Brevard Zoo, as we have for the past six to seven years, we have observed their ability to continue future changes and improvements, and these efforts are impressive indeed. Not only with the execution to keep improving, but also their ability to find sources for the capital improvements (separate from outside county taxes).

The Zoo does not currently have a large stream of big donors which creates the need for Brevard Zoo to be more entrepreneurial than most zoos. They continually embrace change and try new ways, and it shows.

Next year will represent the 20^th anniversary of the zoo. The new addition planned? A major meerkat exhibit. Future expansions also include an expanded Wild Florida section which will include a Black Bear exhibit.

Feedback and collaboration from community supporters

To be this successful, you must be good listeners and continually gaining insights from your customers. The success from Trip Advisor points to customers willing to provide feedback without lots of solicitation. The Zoo’s impressive use of community volunteers also points to a great partnership with the local community.

The Zoo also enjoys lots of support from businesses in Brevard County. Many of them are sponsors for the year-round schedule of activities and special events at the Zoo. Feedback and collaboration … are great enablers of success.

The Brevard Zoo certainly creates a great customer engagement, don’t they?

Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. And Brevard Zoo is leading the way.

Are you a travel site business owner? Need some help in capturing more improvements for your business content marketing? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team workshop?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategy?

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

More reading on travel recommendations from Digital Sparks Marketing’s Library:

Walt Disney World Stories anf Facts Not to Miss

Visiting Charlottesville Virginia and Thomas Jejjerson

10 Reasons Brevard Space Coast is the Best Florida Vacation

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

How to Know Yourself: 9 Ultimate Secrets You Ought to Know

Is there a secret of how to know yourself? Probably not too many of us. But sharing what we learn with others … well, that may be a different story. We should not be strangers to sharing knowledge and advice with others, should we? I recently read a very interesting article from Brain Picking’s Weekly. Ever read from this weekly? Always chock full of interesting reads. Certainly the case here, especially since it is about what Brain Pickings teaches about how to know yourself.

Check out our thoughts on team leverage.

To win, you need only to defeat your doubts.

In this blog, I will share the article (reprioritizing the points to emphasize my feelings on their importance) and add my thoughts on each point.

We love to read about learning, especially when people discuss what they have learned over the years. This is particularly when the people are like Maria Popova. Maria is the substance behind Brain Pickings, a highly influential curation of the best content from the web and beyond.

As she describes it, Brain Pickings is “your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology.” Maria is a prolific reader, reading hundreds of things a day and posts the best to her blog and constantly-updating Twitter feed.

Let’s get started with this recent article from Maria in Brain Pickings:

On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as an email to my seven colleagues at one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college. Over the years that followed, the short weekly email became a tiny website updated every Friday, which became a tiny daily publication, which slowly grew, until this homegrown labor of love somehow ended up in the Library of Congress digital archive of “materials of historical importance” and the seven original recipients somehow became several million readers. How and why this happened continues to mystify and humble me as I go on doing what I have always done: reading, thinking, and writing about enduring ideas that glean some semblance of insight – however small, however esoteric – into what it means to live a meaningful life.

In October of 2013, as Brain Pickings turned seven, I marked the occasion by looking back on the seven most important things I learned from the thousands of hours spent reading, writing, and living during those first seven years. (Seven is an excellent numeral – a prime, a calendric unit, the perfect number of dwarfs.) I shared those reflections not as any sort of universal advice on how a life is to be lived, but as centering truths that have emerged and recurred in the course of how this life has been lived; insights that might, just maybe, prove useful or assuring for others. (Kindred spirits have since adapted these learnings into a poster and a short film.)

As Brain Pickings turns nine, I continue to stand by these seven reflections, but the time has come to add two more. (Nine is also an excellent numeral – an exponential factorial, the number of Muses in Greek mythology, my favorite chapter in Alice in Wonderland.)

Here are the nine subjects reflecting my priorities as well as heading descriptors:

How to know yourself … stillness

Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

My take:

No argument from me here, which is why it is at the top of my list. What is more important than your inner stillness and your ability to maintain and grow it? It enhances your ability to broaden and deepen your participation.

Freedom to change

Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right – even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

My take:

It is very hard for most of us to change, particularly when it involves admitting to being wrong. As active learners we should all practice acknowledging we don’t know or we haven’t formed an opinion.

Know yourself meaning … know who you are

When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

My take:

Nothing is simpler than listening politely and just moving on. You must believe that no one knows you any better than you.

Know your priorities

Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night – and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

My take:

In my opinion, we are all attracted to money, status, approval, prestige. Just try and provide balance those attractions with knowing what your deeper rewards are and explicitly examine them in making tradeoffs.

Why is knowing yourself important … expand your presence

Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living – for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

My take:

Would certainly expect this subject from Maria. She is the master of being involved with as many of her loves as possible. I certainly appreciate giving up some perfection to spread where you can contribute more. If I had the opportunity to redo my career, I would definitely put more focus on this goal. How about you?

Be generous

Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

My take:

Could not say it any better. Appreciate every interaction for its ability to understand and be understood. Imagine what could be achieved if each one of us could improve just 5-10 % here.

Spend the time

“Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that – a myth – as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

My take:

As one who did much employee coaching in his day, teaching patience is one of the most difficult tasks. But it can be the most rewarding for those that develop the skill.

Getting to know yourself activities … magnify your spirit

Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit – it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

My take:

A very interesting way to describe this subject. About 20 years ago I selected 5 authors to magnify my spirit by letting them be my ‘silent’ mentors. They have never let me down.

Learning about ourselves … don’t fear idealism

Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture – which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands – give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want.

But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” – a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial – in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

My take:

I read this one several times before I could put my arms around what I felt Maria wanted us to take away. What I take away from this is that whether we are a realist or an idealist, the focus needs to be staying our course, while maximizing our value add to others.

The bottom line

Thank goodness for the Marias of this world. Without them, we would be learning at a much slower pace. Thank you for all your sharing Maria.

Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s teamwork, collaboration, and learning? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a teamwork or continuous learning workshop?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of business. Find him on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy

How Good Is your Learning from Failure?

10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn

Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Attention Grabbing: How to Own Your Live Audiences

Have you ever wondered how attention-grabbing works with live audiences?

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

Here is the scenario. You are sitting in an unassuming corner of the room and allowing everyone else to talk.

You wait for a pause in the conversation, and then, in a quiet voice — but loud enough to be heard — say, “I have a story to tell you.”

That’s the secret.

Telling a story. That’s all you have to do to capture the audience.

Keeping control is another matter. It will depend on the strength of your story and the skill and generosity with which you tell it.

Tell the story well, but don’t perform it. Tell it with great care, great involvement, great vulnerability, and great sensuality.

The story shouldn’t be like a spotlight shining on you; it should be like a gift you’re giving the listeners.

Giving gifts is how you take over the room, and the best gifts are stories.

The reason that stories are so appealing is that you can transport customers into the story and give your message more meaning.

Here are 12 ways to create a story that will permit you to hold onto the audience you have captured.

Parts to a story

Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your story.

Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.

Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.

how to capture attention in a speech — How to capture attention in a speech.

Build on your experience

To tell great stories, examine your life for times, places, and perspectives nobody else had.

Where do you find material for storytelling?

Draw from your experiences and look inside yourself.

Rely on what you know and draw from it. Capture a thought, truth from your experience, and express values from deep down in your core.

When you tell about these experiences, make it is as if your audience were there.

Good stories are largely an act of curation. The greats detect stories as they move through life and then pull them together in ways that make us stop and think.

In ways, that inspire.

Whenever you write an article or record a video, speak or write authentically, from the heart. Don’t worry about what people will think.

Whether you swear like a sailor or are as clean-cut as they come, whether you are reserved and quiet or as intense as a Navy SEAL instructor, use your personality and style whenever you share your message.

Attention-grabbing … create a strong theme

A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.

The theme is often not stated directly in the story, but it is the essence or the core idea at the story root.

A clear sense of your theme or controlling idea keeps you from trying to throw too many ideas into one story.

Attention-grabbing statements … create a challenge or conflict

Good stories are about challenge or conflict. Without these elements, stories aren’t very interesting. In its most basic form, a story is about someone who wants something, and either gets it or does not.

That character’s desire brings out the conflict that moves a story forward. The appearance of the conflict is the beginning; the resolution is its ending.

The compelling part of a story is how people deal with conflict–-so start with the people and the conflict.

Make it hard to separate the challenges from the characters.

Start working on your ending as soon as possible

Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle.

Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

Capture attention … construct anticipation

Raise questions. Provide the “bait.” The anecdote should raise a question right from the beginning.

Implied in any question that you raise, however, is that you are going to answer it. Constantly raise questions and answer them.

The shape of the story is that you are throwing out questions and answering them along the way.

Attention-grabbing statements … give characters personality and opinions

Give your characters a unique personality and opinions on various topics. What is your character good at, comfortable with?

Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them.

How do they deal? Personalities add greatly to the stories.

How to capture attention in a speech … tap into your audience’s emotions

Whenever I can listen to the best storytellers capturing their audience, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in. It is much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.

The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically.

But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all.

There is no single answer. One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.

Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings.

To make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke their emotion.

Build mystery and surprise

A well-told story is one where you can stop at any point and have the reader wonder “….and then what happened?”

Each time a piece of the mystery is solved, another one appears.

That’s what keeps us listening until we reach the ending.

If you find yourself struggling at times, step back and find some mystery.

Use language to show and not tell

Show and don’t depend just on telling. Intensify the story with vivid language and intonation. Tap into people’s emotions with language.

Use metaphors, idioms, and parables that have emotional associations.

“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway

Show creativity

Be creative. Create a storyboard; draw it out. A good story always has ups and downs, so “arc” the story.

Pull people along, and introduce tension. Make it just like in a fairy tale.

There should be nothing that is standard fare. Focus on making it always creatively unique.

Employ curiosity at the end

Great stories pull readers past the obvious (but wrong) to show them the profound.

You don’t have to beat people over the head with your message, nor do you need always to make your message painfully obvious.

This is not about being vague or unclear. It is about letting the audience work on their own a little to figure things out.

Always create some curiosity.

That’s one of your jobs as one who creates a story. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct.

That’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics that relate to improving the performance of a business.

Go to Amazon to obtain a copy of his latest book, Exploring New Age Marketing. It focuses on using the best examples to teach new age marketing … lots to learn. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Building Infographics: 10 Tools to Become an Impressive Designer

Visuals have a huge impact in marketing. Not only do they make content more shareable — 40 times as much — but they help us retain information. When details are paired with an image, we remember 55% more of it. And that is even more so by building infographics. You would be hard pressed to top that performance.

I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smartphone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using.

Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought.

So to bring an important discovery to market, you first need to identify a real-world problem it can solve and connect to engineers who can transform it into a viable product or service. Then you need to find customers who are willing to drop whatever else they’ve been doing and adopt the innovation on a large scale.

There are many apps for workers looking to improve graphics design like me that can be a big help in this regard. And less wasted time? Yes, very good for that also.

Related: 12 Extraordinary Graphic Design Tools You Should be Using

Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed. Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days.

But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like through apps and idea connection.

This makes you think: What graphical design productivity apps were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?

Looking for images for infographics? Try this site.

Here are my favorites:

Visualize

This generator could be the start of how ‪résumés will be portrayed in the future

You can visualize your resume in one click and also take a look at previous examples.

Enabling people to express their professional accomplishments in a simple yet compelling personal visualization, we think this is the start of something big.

Visual.ly

Visual.ly is both a tool and community for infographics creators

Visual.ly is a community platform for data visualization and infographics set up in 2011. It allows you both to create infographics and get them shared on social media.

The website is also able to match those commissioning infographics – including brands, companies, and agencies – with its community over more than 35,000 designers.

Canva

Oh, how I love the ease and intuitiveness of Canva. From the very beginning, it asks you a series of simple, colorfully-illustrated questions about what’s brought you to their site. (Today, it’s infographics, but there’s a ton of other stuff you can create there, too.)

Once you’ve let Canva know what you want to do, the site generates several templates you can use as a foundation for your infographic.

Plus, it’s got a library of roughly 1,000,000 images that you can add to your project.

From there, you can edit the text, background image, shapes and other aspects of the infographic to make it your own.

And it’s so easy — here’s a goofy one that I put together on how my dog spends his day:

Venngage

Looking for an easy-to-use tool? Venngage is your best bet!

Venngage is a great tool for creating and publishing infographics because it’s so simple and easy to use.

You can choose from templates, themes, and hundreds of charts and icons as well as upload your images and backgrounds, or customize a theme to suit your brand. You can animate them too!

For infographics, there’s a decent range of templates, each categorized by type — statistical, process, and timeline, to name a few.

Some of the templates are limited to premium members, reflecting Venngage’s four-tiered approach to pricing — free, premium, education, and non-profit. Plus, there are templates available for those latter two categories.

Easel.ly

Easel.ly offers a dozen free templates to start you off

This free web-based infographic tool offers you a dozen free templates to start you off, which are easily customizable.

You get access to a library of things like arrows, shapes, and connector lines, and you can customize the text with a range of fonts, colors, text styles and sizes. The tool also lets you upload your graphics and position them with one touch.

Easel.ly is a no-frills platform that’s comprised of infographics.

You can choose which category you’d like, but it’s not quite as organized as some other sites — the drop-down menu is a bit hidden to the left of the templates.

Still, most of the templates appear to be available for free (more become available with a Pro membership), and they’re fairly easy to edit.

Freepik

As its name suggests, Freepik is a resource for, well, free pictures.

Infographics are just one type, but after performing a search for them, there are plenty of options — most of which are complimentary.

The only drawback? Freepik doesn’t quite allow the same level of customization that some others on this list do.

You can download the images for free, but you’ll need a vector graphics editor to customize them.

Infogram

Like many of its visual peers, Infogram is a resource that helps users create both picturesque charts and infographics.

It’s one of the more “grown-up” sites available for building these images, which might explain why very few of their tools are free — including restricting your work from public consumption.

However, Infogram also has the option of enlisting professional help with infographic design.

So if you’re short on time and have a bit of room in your budget, this route might be the best one for you.

Zanifesto

At the very top of Zanifesto’s website, there’s bold red banner that reads, “Create something.”

When you click on that banner, a list of pricing options appears one of which is free and all of which are reasonable. The only drawback?

It looks like you have to create an account to access any of the resources, even the free ones. Plus, the free option restricts you from being able to upload any custom graphics.

But once you do create a free account, there are plenty of template options and, despite not being able to use your graphics, Zanifesto’s library of icons provides a decent selection.

Google Charts

Oh well, maybe a chart isn’t the same as an infographic. But, given the interesting selection templates made available by Google, I would not exclude it.

There are a few items of value in Google charts. First, we love the selection of charts available.

From animated bubble graphs — like the one above — to clever word trees, the features allow users to bring information to life. (I mean, admit it — adding animation to data always makes it a little less boring.)

One of my favorites, GeoCharts, allows data to be assigned to different regions of a map that appear when hovered over. Check it out.

We’ll admit that some features of Google Charts might be a bit more advanced than the other resources we’ve listed.

But, if you’re ready to step up your visuals game, give it a try.