
Case Study
Case Study
We first started working with Elly Charity over two years ago, and we’re shining a light on how visuals support learning across language and cultural barriers.
Elly Charity was born out of a desire to help improve the quality of maternal healthcare and women’s health in the UK and internationally, with a particular focus on training healthcare workers, supporting research excellence, and promoting the application of research into practice.
We’ve been chatting with Ngawai Moss, co-founder of Elly Charity on the importance of visuals as a learning tool, and how they’ve been a pivotal part of Elly Charity’s success in helping women.
Our visuals have played a significant role in the success of Elly Charity, and we couldn’t be prouder to be working with them.
Our first project was visualising findings from a study with a group of women, illustrating the results to give something back to women who had taken part. Having a visual representation helped build a sense of community and offered something tangible that the women could take away, which aligned with Elly Charity’s beliefs in empowering women and improving women’s health.
The visual became a reference point for further development within the Charity, and Ngawai Moss recognised the importance of having something to illustrate their journey. The illustration also represented the Charity’s dedication to understanding and addressing women's needs, from the seeds of an idea to laying the foundations to bring a project to life and make a positive difference.
Check out our case study on it here.
It has become an artefact and has been shared multiple times in multiple ways by the Charity. From being used on their website, socials, at community events and workshops, and for the women themselves, the visual has been essential in both front-facing and behind-the-scenes.
“We’ve used your visuals as a central part of our presentations for decision-makers such as academics, clinicians, and commissioners, which has helped us secure funding bids to develop further.” -Ngawai Moss
The latest grant awarded has allowed Elly Charity to develop a 6-week course for pregnant women who speak little to no English in the UK.
We’ve noticed a real trend in visualising research projects recently, we are seeing this as a more integral part of a lot of research projects. Read this case study for more information.
From the grant they were awarded, Elly Charity recently developed a course to help pregnant women with little to no English in Southend and East London. Our visualiser Ellie P created sensitive and simple images to support learning across a topic that is emotive and where women may be feeling vulnerable, while also overcoming complex medical language.
Ellie P created illustrations that were universally relatable for all women, including those from different cultural backgrounds and religions. The same illustrations were repeated throughout the course to create a feeling of continuity, which demonstrated the importance of building emotional connections through visuals.
So far, the course has been piloted in Southend to a group of women who had 13 different spoken languages in the class. This posed a huge challenge as to how to teach and engage the group with so many different languages in one room, and our visuals were a pivotal focal point in supporting learning and understanding.
“The group of women in Southend had varying levels of English. Some were competent whereas others had no English at all, so it was challenging to effectively teach all of them in one group. Having clear visual aids was the only way to do this.”
Even the feedback from the women speaking no English needed to be done in a visual way, asking them to choose from a range of facial expressions to how helpful they found the course.
And the feedback was brilliant. Women felt safe and educated about their bodies and pregnancy, which couldn’t have happened without visuals to support their learning.
On the East London course that is due to start in September, the majority of women speak no English at all, so Elly Charity is getting creative in the ways they’ll be teaching. A teacher talking to a class won’t work well here, so our visuals will become the universal language for the women on the course, with plans to use them in a more interactive way to support different learning styles and boost engagement and understanding.
This study shows that visuals improve learning by over 400%, and that is in usual teaching circumstances where everyone shares the same language. Using visuals in learning with language barriers is often the only route to shared understanding.
The course was co-produced by health professionals, communities, and English as
a Second Language teachers, and the visuals needed to be a resource that would tick all the boxes, as everyone was coming from a different multidisciplinary perspective.
They need to be not only a teaching aid but a versatile resource that women could refer back to, take home to show their families and show healthcare professionals during their pregnancy.
“Ellie Pritchard created such a beautiful illustration that the women could relate to. It was very encompassing and real for a range of women.”
Ngawai Moss
Not only have our visuals helped secure funding for the project, but they have been paramount for women who speak little to no English to understand more about their pregnancies, which has helped them feel safer when having a baby in a foreign country. It is a testament to the power of visuals in learning and understanding, and the importance of visual communication.
Elly Charity hopes to secure a bigger funding bid next year to roll out their courses nationwide as part of a research project.
We’re proud to be an integral part of this charity’s growing success and to support its important work.
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