Recently, I was asked to collaborate on an application which involved an island in BC’s Salish Sea. Remarkably beautiful and remote, this small island is a jewel in a chain of islands, the Gulf Islands, on the southeastern coast of Vancouver Island, BC.
A colleague who is a professional forester circumnavigated the island in a boat with a community member and took a series of photos of the locations that we would be discussing in the application. I was fortunate—and so was the community. My forester colleague is slightly on the “detail oriented” side and we had a beautiful record from northeast to south and north again and a great “big picture” for funders to see what was being proposed.
The challenge was getting all of these images to the committee in a format which didn’t take up an enormous amount of space and which fit within the guidelines of the application.
The answer was simple and enabled by the talented tech person with whom I work. We set up a gallery in Flickr for the images and provided a link in the opening summary for committee members to browse at their convenience. The images were password protected and only available to the committee.
The funding was approved and a valuable lesson was learned–being able to provide an opportunity to see visually what is being proposed goes beyond words for decision makers.
