Engaging the electorate: visual ideas for covering #election2016

With the US presidential election fast approaching, here's a look at some of the visual elements news outlets have used to cover the campaign trail so far.

Plus, find out about tools you can use to better engage and inform people –not just in the run-up to elections, but before, during, and afterwards too.

LIVESTREAM VIDEO

Ted Cruz by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Livestream video is a very immediate way of bringing readers into your story, it's also simple to do. 

The Boston Globe used Facebook Live to stream results from the New Hampshire primary directly to its Facebook Page, receiving more than 30,000 live viewers. 

Social media director Matt Karolian told Nieman Lab: "This was a big win for us: It was major in terms of reach and engagement, while costing almost nothing to do". 

While it's not possible to embed an active livesteam into a story, once your broadcast has ended it will automatically post to your Facebook timeline, from where you can embed it by grabbing the URL

Note that it is only possible to embed Facebook videos in our enterprise tool, Shorthand. With Shorthand Social stories, such as this one, the best option is to link to the video post instead.

LIVETWEETING

Bernie Sanders by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

If you or a colleague is planning to live-tweet an event, go to twitter.com/settings/widgets and create a Twitter widget for that user, which you can then embed into your story. 

If more than one person will be livetweeting, you can still create a widget for those users by adding them to a Twitter list first. 

Alternatively, you can use Storify to curate posts from social media and embed them into your story. NPR did something similar with The Stream, a collaborative platform for which reporters were tasked with sending in short copy, photos, fact checks, and other snippets to offer bite-size chunks of election-coverage. 

RESULTS MAPS

John Kasich by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

On election nights, maps are often used to incorporate live analysis and show who's winning. 

CartoDB is a freemium tool you can use to create maps from data sources. Maps are easy to update and embed in a story, and the tool is also responsive, so works well whether your readers are coming from mobile or desktop. 

GRAPHICS

Caricature by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Political debates are often driven by soundbites, which lend themselves well to quote cards. 

Often shared on Twitter and other social media, these graphics are also an excellent way of highlighting a standout quote or point, and to break up the text in your story. 

The Washington Post, for example, created quote cards to share on Twitter on primary night as the results came in. 

The Post has its own graphics team to work on these, of course, but you could create your own using a free tool such as Canva

Alternatively, NPR's social media team has made the image tools it uses for social media sharing – including Quotable, Factlist and Waterbug – freely available on GitHub.

Visit Shorthand.com to try out these tools and others within the demo area.

All images by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. Some rights reserved.