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 itself actually shrinks. What the layperson thinks is a large photo becomes too small when readied for print.

So let’s do the math: Say you have a beautiful 6- by 4-inch photo at a resolution of 72 dpi. It’s your best photo, and your organization plans to use it extensively across many platforms. And let’s say a newspaper art director wants that photo to appear on the front page as a 6- by 4-inch picture. It won’t happen.

Newsprint requires 200 dpi, so the only way a newspaper could use that 6- by 4-inch image is to reduce it to one-third of its size. Yes, it’s now a 2- by 1.3-inch photo. Ouch! That’s not going to appear on the front page of a newspaper.

If you think that’s bad, consider this: Magazines and other glossy print publications require 300 dpi, so to get that resolution, your 6- by 4-inch image would have to be reduced to one-fourth of its size—1.5-inch by 1-inch.

The 300 dpi rule also holds true for direct-mail pieces, annual reports, programs, etc. And it gets exponentially worse if you intend to use that image on a poster, banner, bus-shelter ad, or billboard.

The good news is that 72 dpi is the optimal resolution for Web images (any higher and the site will load too slowly). Therefore, if a photo is for your Web site or blog, it’s fine. But if you haven’t saved it in the original size, your absolute best photo won’t be seen anywhere but on the Internet.

This image is in focus and has proper dpi.

To ensure that you have large photos that can be used in any medium, make sure all photos are initially taken at the largest size possible, and then saved at that size.

If your organization doesn’t have a staff photographer, or if employees are asked to snap event photos or photos from the field, it’s best to draw up guidelines for camera settings. Think like a professional and save all the originals; make digital copies as needed for different projects.

The same photo that has been improperly resized without adjusting the dpi. As you can see, it's blurry and therefore unusable.

And when that publication calls asking for photos for a big cover story, send them those raw files. Leave the resizing to the professionals: Art directors will want to re-size photos themselves to ensure maximum quality.  Too often, laypeople resize a photo improperly or size it down to 72 dpi so that it’s easier to send via e-mail. Or they mistakenly change the dpi and lock the size, which makes for a blurry and pixilated photograph—also unusable.

Don’t stymie your charity’s exposure! To ensure that your organization’s photographs are ready for maximum media coverage, save the original digital images and forward those to news professionals. Your organization deserves to be showcased, right?

Share your advice on how to get photos of your organization’s work that you can share beyond the Internet. Or detail your experience with a bad-quality photo.

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 them out, and let the recipient select the one that speaks to them.”

More often than not, the process inspires the recipient to tell his or her story—possibly about a love of the ocean or an unforgettable trip to a far-flung location.

“It’s an entry point for stories about our work—not just photos on cards,” Ms. Luca says. “They show things that you’ve never seen or could never see on your own.”

A bonus, she elaborates, is that charity staff members hand deliver cards to the very people the charity wants to reach, reinforcing a personal connection.

The photos on the cards are all taken in an animal’s natural setting, a principle that Conservation International learned in its longtime alliance with the International League of Conservation Photographers.

The business cards also feature the charity’s new tagline, “People need nature to thrive.”

A post on the charity’s internal Web site showcases all 33 photographs, with detailed background and stories about the shots featured on the cards. The goal is to make sure all staff members have a working knowledge of the variety of images.

(Photograph by Sterling Zumbrunn/Conservation International)

Many photos are what one would expect from a conservation charity: landscapes, seascapes, animals, and insects—ranging from gorillas to dragonflies. But the organization also included images of indigenous people (such as a man in Surinam weaving a basket from local reeds) as well as people simply enjoying nature.

A charity’s photos may evoke joy, inspiration, devastation, or hope. Conservation International understands the power of its images and values them enough to use them to give potential supporters a strong first impression.

Has your organization done anything creative with its business cards? Would using photos help advance your visual presence? Send me a copy of your cards and we’ll show the most creative ones here.

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 company were excited, said Ms. Tysor, and wanted to help in any way possible. Clearly, teamwork is a top priority at the ballet. The public-relations team was determined to produce multipurpose photos that all departments could use in their efforts, especially the fund raisers.

For The Chronicle, this image turned out to be perfect to accompany an article highlighting the results of our annual survey of nonprofit endowments. In print, the picture appeared on the front page and online it graced the most prominent spot on our home page. Now you can find it residing on a page that highlights all of The Chronicle‘s research.

Year after year, the endowment study is one of the most difficult to illustrate because endowments and investments are not visual. But not this year. The Houston Ballet’s creative thinking is an ideal example of making photos work. A single image tells the story, and the sort of photo shoot that produced it could easily work for a lot of other organizations. In the ballet’s case, all that was needed were dancers and a construction site. And two hard hats.

(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 for Children is hard to show, especially because of restrictions on identifying kids in pictures, this photo captures the essence of the group’s work.

(Photograph © 2009 Marc Carter for Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children)

Michelle Gienow’s recent article for The Chronicle has great advice on the hows and whys of getting good photos for your organization. As Dara Royer, executive director of communications at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s fund-raising arm, told Ms. Gienow: “Few donors will be able to ever actually walk through the doors at St. Jude. But photography provides a window into our mission the way nothing else in a communicator’s tool kit can. It creates a direct connection.”

(Photograph courtesy of Habitat for Humanity International/Ezra Millstein)

Habitat for Humanity International has always made it a priority to take great photos depicting its work building homes for low-income people—beautiful shots of volunteers hammering, raising 2-by-4s, and painting. Last year, the group photographed a series of new homeowners, capturing their elation.

All of the above photos have a visceral and immediate impact and leave the viewer with a clear sense of the charity’s work.

Through my new blog, I hope to show your group how to select photos with purpose that will get you the kind of attention your group deserves. I will guide you through the nitty-gritty of getting good photos for your own use and to grab the attention of the news media. Following each print edition of The Chronicle, I’ll spotlight a photo that worked well, describe how the organization made it happen, explain why other photos didn’t work, or the relate the challenges I had trying to convey the best image to accompany an article.

I hope you’ll share your lessons about how to attract media attention with great art. How does your organization use photos to illustrate and enhance your mission? How have your photos led to better media coverage? What questions—creative or technical—do you have about your charity’s use of images?