A digital alternative to a print publication can provide you with new options to create a truly captivating storytelling experience for your readers.
The high-quality imagery, pacing, and flow that print supports allows it to be engaging for readers. When turning a print piece digital, a lot of the qualities that make it so impactful can be lost.
But now we have a better path for creating digital stories.
In the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s (PHS) GROW magazine, we’re incorporating different forms of digital media to create a more immersive experience for readers.
- Video — adding a video element to the feature story allows readers to explore and understand the concept better. It provides another avenue for readers to experience the story.
- Scrolling Photos — using full screen photos that transition as you scroll mimics the excitement of page turning, only better. In a print piece we would have displayed the photos in a photo gallery, which would have limited the number and size, and frankly can look underwhelming. We can also use this feature to display infographics By breaking the infographic down, we’re able to layer each piece as the reader scrolls. This technique allows us to focus the attention on each gorgeous photo and segment of information, while encouraging readers to scroll to see what’s next.
- Clickable Links — digital publications allow us to insert active, clickable links to other content we want the reader to explore. We use these links to send the reader deeper into PHS’s resources to learn more about specific plants, upcoming events, shopping links, or PHS databases.
- Responsiveness — arguably one of the most important features of a digital publication is being able to read it on your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop allowing you to take it wherever you are. For this to be successful, the digital version of your publication needs to support all devices. If you pull up GROW magazine on your phone and on your laptop, you’ll see how all the features of the magazine to function seamlessly across devices.
Transitioning to a digital publication can help you stretch your creativity and incorporate additional content important to your organization and the reader. When you explore GROW here, you can see the elements we were able to incorporate to truly transform the content.
And that’s just what we’ve tried so far. As we evolve the magazine online we can incorporate surveys, mapping, integrated fundraising, CMS integration and more.
“Their team worked with us to keep a number of elements consistent from print to digital, while also adding in creative ideas, plus digital-only features and functions that would further engage our readers, like video, interactive graphics, and clickable links to photo galleries and even online shopping opportunities.”
— Erin Dunkel, Vice President of Content Marketing, PHS
Changing a publication in any way can be a challenging feat — but working with a team that knows how to take advantage of a digital version, can help ease some anxiety. Email us or give us a call at 267-468-7949 to learn more about how we can help transform your digital publication.
