If you’ve ever been on a WSA Community course, you’ll no doubt have been asked to choose a postcard from WSA’s extensive collection as part of an information sharing or cohesion building exercise. We asked WSA’s Company Director, Wendy Sugarman, to fill us in on how postcards support participation and inclusion in community development.
What do you use postcards for?
Images are powerful catalysts that help people share information, tell personal stories and talk about their underlying values. Postcards are therefore an essential part of the WSA facilitation toolkit. A simple pack of postcards can provide a great prompt to answer a question or explore an issue, like thoughts on how things are now or the type of change people would like to see. Postcards are particularly useful for visioning exercises – so communities can visualise what they want to achieve.
In group settings we usually scatter a bunch of cards on a tabletop and then ask everyone to choose one that represents how they think or feel about an issue or a change they would like to make. This gives each participant a chance to speak in their own time and encourages everyone to contribute.
Postcard exercises are a useful way to capture diverse views, because several people often choose the same card but interpret it differently. As WSA Community’s former Evaluation and Training Manager, Vicky Daborn Tedder, says in this video, the freedom to choose whichever card speaks to you also relieves people from the pressure of getting the ‘right’ answer.
Vicky Daborn Tedder explains how to use postcards in a visioning exercise
What advice would you give to other people incorporating postcards in their community engagement practice?
Depending on what we’re trying to achieve, we might facilitate a whole-group discussion (in which everyone shares their chosen postcard in turn) or ask participants to work in small groups to share their cards. Either way, we usually display the images on a flip-chart sheet, adding words to give a little more context. This is a quick and easy way to create a collage in which everyone’s views are represented – a visual record that you can document, or simply keep on the wall to refer back to later in the session. If groups make the collages together, it also fosters collaboration.
Visual devices like postcards provide a quick and straightforward way for people to engage. By giving communities a range of pre-prepared visual stimuli, it usually makes it easier for people to settle on – and communicate – what matters to them. However, it’s important to recognise that some people really don’t like being driven by images. After all, everyone has different learning and communication styles. It’s therefore worth making it clear that people don’t have to choose a card if they don’t want to. It’s useful, also, to have some blank cards available, so people can write words down if they prefer, or create their own image if they can’t find one that works for them.
Do you have a favourite postcard?
I’ve got a few personal favourites, but what’s really interesting is that, out of the 500 or so postcards I have, there are about 10 or 15 cards that are chosen again and again. They tend to be images that relate to diverse communities, collaboration and building positive environments. One particularly popular card is of a comfortable-looking armchair. Another depicts a grow your own vegetable box.
How did you build up your postcard collection?
Well, I had a few postcards at the beginning, but not enough. So, I went on eBay and I basically bought batches of other people’s postcards. And I found them fascinating. Some were really old. And some were written to other people. Often, when I’m using the postcards, people don’t just look at the images, they start reading the backs, too.
It’s kind of a mystery, about the people who owned and wrote the postcards. When you read the backs of the postcards, you start to piece together who these people were connected with and who might have sent them a postcard. It’s like a fragment of a past connection… a poignant reminder that this person was once part of a community themselves.
Are you still collecting postcards?
Yes, but my focus today is primarily about diversifying the collection and increasing the breadth of representation. This is obviously vital when building inclusion. We want everyone we work with to find the images we share interesting and relevant.