Our good friend (and honorable Embolden board of advisors member) Rick Schwartz, recently sent out an email blast imploring nonprofits to step up the impact of their annual reports by creating content with pizzazz. Annual reports suck up so much time, money and resources, and rather than filling them up with the usual dry letters from the ED, bland reams of financial data and lists of donors, Rick suggests that your report should appeal to your readers’ emotions, tangibly support your organization’s mission and goals and compellingly tout its successes, pithily and with style.
As web-heads dyed in the cloth, we Emboldenites get really excited about these kinds of ideas because we know what the web can do for something like an annual report. We have been hearing a lot of buzz lately about organizations wanting to supplement their printed reports with some online solution, or replace them altogether, and rightfully so. The tough economy has many nonprofits and community foundations looking to save money, and paring down an annual report or “webifying” it completely can save mucho dinero on printing costs, not to mention that a well designed template can be reused every year rather than sending the paper version to the recycling bin and starting all over again.
An even more compelling case to begin thinking about a virtual annual report is the fact that web technologies can offer visually tactile, personalized, interactive alternatives to the printed page. Imagine a few static grantee photos on page 12 of your printed annual report with a paragraph next to each to tell their stories; now imagine those same stories come to life on a website in a montage of slides with a voiceover of the actual people telling their own stories.
Imagine some flat yawn-inducing pie charts on your printed report just screaming to be ignored; now imagine the same pie charts on a web page which you can click on and view as a bar chart instead, or perhaps drill down to more granular data on specific funding categories. Wonks unite!
The net net is that a printed annual report, if done well, can be really good, but a virtual one, if done well, can be just as compelling, and in many ways even more so.
Read Rick Schwartz’s article.
Check out Rick’s website (if you don’t know Rick, you should! And if you haven’t signed up for his Schwartz Talk e-newsletter, do so now!)