Indi Tansey On Why Strategic Visual Storytelling Is Essential For Social Entrepreneurs To Communicate Change

Indi Tansey, founder of Indi Dust, is an artist, strategist, and changemaker who empowers organisations through visual storytelling.

Indi guides clients on a creative journey, drawing out their unique stories and bringing them to life visually.

With over a decade in global advertising and experience as a company director, technology entrepreneur, and community builder, Indi has honed her superpower: transforming complex ideas into impactful narratives.

Through Strategic Visual Storytelling, Indi creates assets that align with organisational values, driving meaningful engagement and real change. Her work, known for its clarity, emotional depth, and vibrant design, helps organisations connect authentically with their audiences.

A champion of social change, Indi is dedicated to empowering leaders to share stories that resonate, inspire action, and create lasting impact.

Indi discusses why she has observed social enterprises naturally choosing to implement Strategic Visual Storytelling to communicate their theory of change, simplify their messaging, and align with the values of customers and stakeholders.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in storytelling, communications and entrepreneurship?

[Indi Tansey] - When I was reflecting on this question, I remembered right from my years as a child and teenager I was passionate about stories and art.

I especially remember this one moment when I won an anti-smoking poster competition in primary school, and I came up with this headline which was, “you're not a smoker, just the sucker on the end.” I created this artwork for it, and my poster won the competition!

Remembering this moment, I think I have these ideas, and the way I communicate them has this persuasive power that is valuable. That was a moment of creativity early on, and there are lots of these moments throughout my life. I've always felt compelled to capture what's happening in my life around me, and I've done this using words and pictures.

I became interested in art and English, and I studied visual communication design in New Zealand while I worked as a designer. I fell in love with ideas when I became an art director.

Then I worked in copywriting and advertising agencies all around the world. I became good at what I was doing, but there was always this voice whispering that maybe there was another way to use my talents.

This led me to quitting my job at an agency in Dublin, and then I got on a bicycle and decided I would let people vote where I travelled around the world. It was supposed to be only for a month, but before I knew it, I had been cycling for 18 months! I travelled through 12 countries, and eventually had around 20,000 people voting on where I went.

It was a wild ride of self-discovery, and it was the ultimate experiment to teach me about how to share stories with a global audience. I drew pictures and I told stories through my blog, and I think at that point I realised it wasn't about where I was going, but the story I told along the way.

The biggest compliment I ever received was that the people who followed me felt like they were with me on the journey. To summarise, I had an advertising career and then I embarked on this weird cycling side journey.

After this, I ended up in Argentina, and that's where I became interested in tech start-ups. Buenos Aires is teeming with start-ups, and I started using my communication skills to grow business ideas. This eventually brought me back to Australia, and it's where I became a co-founder of another tech start-up.

Moreover, I got into community building, became a board director, fell in love, and had a child. That's the squiggly line that brings you to where I am today.

As the founder of Indi Dust, can you share more about this organisation and how you are breathing life into the stories and narratives of enterprises and organisations?

I have this crazy mix of experiences, and that's led to me having this unique mixture of skillsets in art, strategy and storytelling. The reason I call it my superpower is because I I'm good at just taking a lot of complex information and turning it into something simple and meaningful. Even better, I can do this live!

This is super helpful for organisations who want to communicate the good they're doing in the world with lots of different people. Mostly, I’m contacted by people who have this vision of where they want to go to and the people who they want to bring on the journey.

It's a little bit like I'm back on my bicycle adventure when I was bringing people with me, but now Indi Dust is my vehicle.

I use it to work with the people doing good in the world who need to communicate their story in a way that's going to inspire action and align people to their mission. This happens through visual stories, and they can be images, animations, and videos. I go to workshops, conferences, and retreats to capture these stories and turn them into visual artifacts.

People become part of these visual artifacts on the day, and when they see them later, it reminds them of a vision that's been shaped. It reminds them of what they've committed to, and they can then see themselves in these stories.

It's a unique thing that I'm doing, and I think it would be helpful to share an example of one of our projects. Recently, I collaborated with CSnet (who do impact measurement) and ParentTV (who just finished this documentary about parenting). These organisations both wanted to illustrate their Theory of Change.

We worked on this Theory of Change together, so it's a very collaborative process. We ended up with this visual of a human who was in the shape of a lock. Then there is a key, which is the curiosity to unlock transformative change.

I use metaphors to craft these simple visuals, and it helps for them to talk to funders who they want to bring on board to help support their cause.

Then, we get into the details of a Theory of Change and dig down to a deeper level, but ultimately, it's about helping demonstrate the difference these organisations are making.

What are the fundamental elements of Strategic Visual Storytelling, and what differentiates it from traditional marketing and communications?

As a phrase, Strategic Visual Storytelling can be a bit of a mouthful. I've aligned myself to this concept, but ultimately, we've done it since the dawn of time. We've been painting on the walls of caves telling stories with pictures.

Ultimately, Strategic Visual Storytelling is just pictures and words (the words are a more recent addition) that communicate complex ideas with clarity and impact. It's taking complexity and turning it into clarity in a visual way. I find the combination of words and pictures is powerful, and when traditional marketing and communications are done well, they are also Strategic Visual Storytelling.

Often however, marketing is very salesy. This gets to the c essence of what you're asking, and I think with technology and AI everything is changing now. It's quite overwhelming at times.

Yes, it's awesome; we have everything we have ever wanted to know at our fingertips. But I harness this power of creating hand drawn sketches summarising a lot of information.

Think of these as like executive summaries of a strategic document, except instead they are simple visuals relevant to a particular audience showing them how they fit into a story.

I want people to see my work, the Indi Dust visuals and have that ‘aha’ moment. That means the visuals need to be accessible, simple, and sticky in people’s minds. that's what I try to use to gauge how successful my visuals are, if people can see themselves in your big picture, that creates momentum. That's when people are with you on the journey, and it’s also when anything becomes possible.

I now understand that if you have people with you on your journey, whatever the mission is you're trying to achieve is possible.

During your career and involvement in the tech start-up space, how did you balance your creative skill set with other pragmatic business considerations?

When I landed in Argentina, I lived with entrepreneurs. I didn't even know what entrepreneurs were at that point in time, but they were writing on the office windows with whiteboard pens, drawing images to work out how their ideas to re-invent the world connected.

I became drawn to these people as a creative person, and I found my visual storytelling was super helpful. I was drawing maps and inventing the road ahead for founders coming up with ideas which didn’t exist yet.

On my website, I have this picture of a person reaching up into someone's thought bubble and turning it into a picture. That's the way I worked with my co-founders. I could take their vision and turn it into a map we could all follow.

I could take the essence of a business idea and communicate it simply, but as the business grew, how could I balance this creative approach? It was challenging because I had to take on all these other responsibilities as a co-founder, like marketing, human resources, and finance.

These were not my skillsets, and so I fell in love with Simon Wardley’s idea that when starting an organisation, you need a mixture of Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners. I am squarely in the pioneer camp, I’m good at making the maps, but once it's time to put in the sewage or organise public transport for the ‘new land’, that's probably not my skillset!

When you're creating Strategic Visual Storytelling for organisations, as a Pioneer, how do you work with the Town Planners and Settlers to help them activate your vision?

The Pioneers job is to set that vision strongly. Even when you're beginning to bring in the Settlers, you're never going to also hire Town Planners at the start. If you do, it's going to be an awkward phase; they're not going to feel like they're in the right place for what they're good at.

The Pioneers job is to break the land, they're good at being able to see opportunities and fail quickly. They can keep things moving and bring people with them, but they’re always trying to communicate their vision with the Settlers. The Settlers will start testing to see if you have a scalable idea that is going to help the world according to your Theory of Change.

To me, Settlers specialise in finding a product market fit, when you're trying to see if the world needs what you are creating. Once you've proven that, you bring in your Town Planners, and so many people bring in the town planners too early.

If you haven't organised and proved that the core of what you're doing is valuable (and I've made this mistake a couple of times), there's no point having the people who are going to ‘put in the sewage’ or do more detailed town planning. You can’t take an idea to the world if you haven't established your core business concept.

Sometimes, you will need to go back to the Pioneer space, even in more established organisations. When you're trying to launch something new or you have started a new initiative internally, you might have to go back to the drawing board. It doesn't mean that once you're a Town Planner, that's all you will ever do.

It's quite cool when you know which of those three camps you prefer to operate in, because you can create opportunities utilising your skills best. As a founder, you can't always hire the person who can provide what you need, so you must upskill for a period.

This was how I became connected with Women in Technology, because they did a whole lot of training around governance, risk and financial literacy. They helped me lift my game enough that I could get us to hiring that next level of specialist team members.

Why is visual storytelling an effective tool for social enterprises to engage stakeholders, enhance their impact, and transform their organisation?

Visual storytelling resonates for social enterprise because it helps convey their values and mission in a more emotionally engaging way. It simplifies the business down so that it's easy to understand for different stakeholders. It can make complex social issues more relatable.

A project I'm wrapping up now I worked on with MuraConnect, and they do recruitment in Queensland. They worked with me to create this visual story sharing who they are and how they give back.

That was the brief, but what we ended up doing was we visualised their logo as islands on a fictional map of Mura. We created this fictional world and script that talked about all the facets of their business, how they impact society and how they create positive ripple effects.

We created all these landmarks and things that they do, and we brought it to life in video. The founder spoke to that video, and then this map emerged. We literally created a whole new world for people to understand who MuraConnect are. They are a social enterprise, they give back a lot to the community, and it was a way of differentiating them in a sea of sameness.

There are so many people doing recruitment, but not many who give back to First Nations initiatives. It was a cool way of showing how what they're doing is a bit different and creating a whole new space in people's minds for them to exist.

Do you find social entrepreneurs are more willing to engage in unique visual storytelling practices?

The short answer is yes.

[Social entrepreneurs] see the value in telling their story in an authentic and unique way, because they understand it's the story that is going to change the world. People aren't just buying into their organisation; they're buying into their story and vision of how their organisation is going to make a difference.

To me, that feels like a good place for visual storytelling, because you can get to these places you can't get to with words only.

Where have you observed entrepreneurs commonly making mistakes when trying to communicate their stories, values, mission and impact?

It can be easy when you're an expert at something to overload people with information. If you're the founder or leader of a business and you know a lot (maybe too much in some ways), it can be hard to simplify your message down to something with clarity.

On the other hand, people just don't have time. They don't want all your data points; they want to remember a simple and memorable message. This is a space I've been doing a lot of work in lately. If you're communicating to a board or an investor, they often have a short amount of time to understand a lot of information.

I've seen people try to say too much in their pitch decks. Recently, I’ve started doing a co-facilitation workshop with a woman, Helen Henderson from Board Impact. We teach people how to use visual storytelling and board reporting when you only have a short amount of time to communicate your key message.

We've just started doing this, but we go in with sketchbooks and pens to help people simplify their information into strategic storytelling points. Then, they map out the story they want to share with pen and paper first.

This might end up only being a PowerPoint slide, but we use these practices to help entrepreneurs simplify their messages.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating positive change?

One of my clients is Evolve Communities, and they do cultural awareness training. It's such a unique model, and one of the co-founders Aunty Munya has her own TikTok channel called Ask Aunty. Then with their other co-founder Carla Rogers, they make a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Recently, they've won a heap of awards around building communities; their programs help you understand your own beliefs and biases in an easy, no blame, no shame way. I go to their webinars every couple of months, and I live draw them.

They get up to a thousand people in these webinars, who want to understand how they can become allies. The seminars take a massive idea like Closing the Gap and talk about what it means.

This organisation has totally shifted the way I look at the world and understand my own privilege, and they make it so fun and enjoyable. It doesn't have to be this horrible process where you carry a lot of guilt, we can all make better choices.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend for our listeners?

If anyone listening is interested in visual storytelling as a career pathway, there's this amazing community of visual practitioners called GRA, Graphic Recorders Australia and New Zealand.

For so long I didn't know they even existed, and that's why I'd love to share more about them. We meet monthly online and get together in person every year, this year it's in Melbourne in November, and it's such a cool way to connect with other like-minded visual practitioners.

I want to give a shout out to my new friend Anna Noon; I met her at the Reignite Retreat. She builds tiny forests with the Groundswell Collective, but she shared with me one of her all-time favourite Ted Talks (which is now one of my favourites) from Damon Gameau.

He did a TEDxSydney talk about storytelling and how humans can reconnect with nature by changing the way we view the planet. She sent it to me after the Reignite Retreat, and I've watched it many times since.

Indi Dust Visual Design Storytelling.jpg

It gets you thinking about our shared stories are how we all relate to one another. We can feel like we're trapped in these narratives, but we can also write new stories. I think there are so many opportunities for social enterprises to champion unity and empathy with storytelling.