6 Resources for Building Impactful Nonprofit Annual Reports
Your nonprofit’s annual report is more than a recap—it’s a tool to communicate the impact you’ve made over the past year and inspire your community about what comes next. When done correctly, annual reports can mobilize fundraising, act as a tone-setter for your communications and promises over the next year, and provide a moment to reflect and thank all of your staff and partners for their work.
How can you make sure you get it right? In this roundup, we’ve gathered a collection of resources to help you plan and create an impactful annual report.
1. Get Inspired By Best Practices?
Each year, Constructive’s Executive Director Matt Schwartz identifies some of the best reports for your inspiration and why we think they’re each so effective. Explore some of the most compelling reports from 2023 and exactly why we love them. (And stay tuned for our 2024 update!)
2. Tell Client’s Stories Ethically
In this past Constructively Curated, we?outlined resources on integrating inclusive and ethical storytelling into your practice—something that is especially important when it relates to client storytelling in your annual report.?The stories of those you serve can showcase your impact, but they must be shared with intentionality and authenticity in both words and visuals.
3. Build Trust from Industry Trends
Our annual reports don’t live in a vacuum. Rather, we must express an understanding of the larger industry trends at work to both connect our work to them and to make sure we’re engaging people in the most effective way. Each year, Edelman publishes its?Trust Barometer: the result of research into public sentiments surrounding trust, polarization, and authority. It’s a great resource for gauging the public’s current perception of your sector and nonprofits as a whole so you can present your impact in the most trustworthy way to win over skeptical audiences.
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4. Embrace Digital Formats??
While many organizations still publish their annual reports as PDFs, you should consider embracing an interactive?online report experience. Digital reports have a host of benefits like increasing accessibility while giving your organization more room for functionality and creativity. In this article?written by Paul Sternberg, Director of UX & Strategy at Constructive, Paul makes the case for investing in a digital report. Among other things, he discusses shareability, keeping things current, and making your report more engaging.
5. Consider How to Best Visualize your Data
Stories are compelling, but audiences will also want to see hard numbers in your annual report that speak to your impact, effectiveness, and sustainability as an organization. We need to choose how to best visualize this data so it both captures attention and communicates numbers quickly and accessibly. This Tableau resource outlines helpful data visualization tips?to make your visualizations predictable, clear, and strategic.
6. Review Dos and Don’ts from The Chronicle of Philanthropy
No annual report is the same, but The Chronicle of Philanthropy presents some hard and fast dos and don’ts that apply to almost all cases. COP elevates how we should be focusing on our readers and aiming to meet our audiences where they’re at, considering design, length, and more.
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Insights & Strategy for Purposeful Communication
4 个月The Trust Barometer is a great first step to incorporating communication research. Also consider: ?? checking industry expectations by reviewing competitor/peer reports and media reactions to them ?? having audience profiles handy while you're writing and planning the communication strategy for the report's release ?? talking with your staff and stakeholders during data collection and writing. These conversations can lead to stories for the report and launch, increase buy-in with your mission and the report launch itself, build important relationships, and start conversations about your mission and values. ?? outline and test your reports' key messages to ensure the report tells your impact story effectively ?? make a media plan for the report's launch underscoring those key messages Because an effective annual report isn't just about the text of the report. It's also about the conversations you have around it.