When a newspaper or magazine requests a photograph to accompany an article showcasing your organization, you won’t send them a wallet-size photo-booth snap, will you?

That happens at The Chronicle every week. Charities unwittingly send me dozens of photographs so small they would look terrible if published, so we cannot use them. Most photos start out large, but unless they have been saved in the original, raw size (or as large as possible), there’s a good chance they’re far too small to appear in any print publication. That photo you think is large enough may not be.

Photographic images are made up of tiny dots, and the quality of a photograph, or resolution, is measured in dots per inch (dpi). In a printed picture with extremely low dpi, you can easily see the individual dots (think of a comic-book image).

When a photo needs to have its dpi increased, the photo…

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What if your organization is lucky (or prescient) enough to have thousands of great photos depicting your mission? What creative ways could you use them to advance your charity’s voice and connect with people in a real way?

Last September, as it was adopting a new look to reinforce the organization’s identity, Conservation International’s creative-services team brainstormed an innovative approach. Because the group did not have much money to spend to publicize its new look, it needed a simple tool to help tell its story in a different way.

Selecting 33 stunning images of wildlife and natural settings from its archives, the charity now features them on employees’ business cards.

“It’s now fun to give out my business cards; people always say, ‘Wow!’ ” says Heather Luca, the organization’s creative-services senior director. “I flip them over, splay the…

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Liao Xiang and Michael McGonegal dance atop the Houston Ballet's new facility (Photographs by Jim Caldwell.)

When the Houston Ballet conducted an endowment campaign for its new Center for Dance, which opened in April, its public-relations team turned the traditional topping-off ceremony into an exciting event with a simple idea:

Put dancers at the construction site! Put hard hats on their heads!

“Buildings are built every day,” notes Shauna Tysor, the ballet’s public-relations manager. Instead, she says, the organization decided to emphasize its mission. “Go with what’s unique about your organization,” she urges. “With your photo, you can remind people what it’s for: ‘Oh, it’s for dance,’ not ‘Oh, it’s a building under construction.’ ”

The dancers and entire…

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(Photograph courtesy of Water.org)

Made you smile, right? Water.org’s photo of Indian schoolchildren celebrating fresh drinking water truly grabs the viewer. It’s spontaneous. It’s exuberant. And it’s a newspaper art director’s dream photo.

As the person who has overseen how The Chronicle looks for more than 20 years, I should know.

All nonprofits yearn for more and better media coverage. Your charity may have the most innovative or successful or tear-jerking story, but without photos, many news-media outlets won’t give that story good placement—especially in the digital age.

I know, I know—not every organization has the built-in cachet of cute kids or dramatic events. But any organization can take good photos.

For instance: Although the mission of Court Appointed Special Advocates…

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