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InfoStories

ILO launches innovative website on labour issues

New InfoStories website uses video, data visualization and illustration to explain themes including collective bargaining, discrimination in the workplace and forced labour.

Press release | 10 May 2016
GENEVA – The International Labour Organization (ILO) has launched a new "InfoStories" website, providing an innovative and in-depth look at key issues in the world of work.

InfoStories is an adaptation of an iPad app launched in 2014, which was the first of its kind for the ILO. The new website allows users to delve into a broad range of multimedia content on particular themes, such as child and forced labour and discrimination in the workplace.

In InfoStories, readers can navigate through videos, data visualizations, illustrations and other interactive elements that present complex concepts and the results from ILO research in clear, jargon-free language.

“InfoStories represents a great step forward for the ILO’s digital storytelling. After the development of the iPad app, the web version of InfoStories will reach new audiences, helping to fulfil the platform’s potential as an advocacy tool for world of work issues and to develop a recognizable and innovative digital presence for the ILO,” explains Inês Gomes, ILO Digital Publishing Officer.

Tackling sex discrimination through pay equity
Charlotte Beauchamp, former head of the Publishing unit in the ILO and originator of the project, recalls that the objective was to adopt a digital-only and highly visual approach to ILO issues: “Rather than taking a traditional journalistic angle, we decided on an infographic approach – editing down quite complex information and retelling it with more images than words – and to make a product that would be purely digital.”

With its visual and innovative approach, InfoStories makes an ideal tool for presentations and classes on labour-related themes. For researchers, it also offers the raw data used in each chart for download.

Deceptive recruitment and coercion
The InfoStories website has been developed over the course of eight months by British digital agency Syndicut in collaboration with the ILO. Syndicut co-director Nick Bromage points out that one of the biggest challenges of the project was adapting a content management system (CMS) to the InfoStories requirements: “The website has been constructed by tailoring an existing CMS system and creating a modular and bespoke InfoStories CMS within it. This allows content editors to completely customize each individual story and chapters within them, giving each one a unique look and feel. All of this has been created paying close attention to the original design of the navigation and user experience of the InfoStories iPad app, ensuring all content is beautifully displayed across a wide range of devices.”

The InfoStories app is available for free on the App Store. It has already been downloaded in over 30 countries and was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair and at Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University. It currently offers all five issues published online.

The next issues to be covered by InfoStories will be youth employment and disability in the workplace, which will be published in the next few months. Readers can sign up on ilo.org/infostories to get a notification via e-mail once new stories are published.