How to Craft an Annual Report That Inspires Action

If you run a nonprofit, charity, or any organization focused on social good, annual reports are a must-do every year. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, it’s crucial for you to share your financial data and important updates with your donors, clients, supporters, and the public. But we know that numbers on their own don’t tell the whole story of what your organization’s impact is over the course of a year.

Is the main audience of your report your existing donors or do you also want to attract new donors? Are you hoping to drive donations, or is it enough to develop brand awareness and affinity for your organization?

There’s no right or wrong answer, but when you clarify your audience and goals, you’re better able to tailor your report to speak to specific people — and encourage them to take a specific action.

Next, take stock of what your organization accomplished over the year and where it had a meaningful impact. Whether it was a year of growth, innovation, or resiliency, giving your report a theme or name will lay the groundwork for a cohesive experience, from the perspectives of both content and design.

It’s easy to get caught in the weeds and lose sight of the big picture. When you work within an organization and you’re aware of just how many projects you run, programs you offer, budgets you manage, and communities you serve, it can be challenging to identify the main story amidst all those little details.

Find an external partner, like Briteweb, who can help read between the lines, identify the tension points, call out successes, and connect the dots to settle on the narrative you’ll weave into your report.

Putting together an annual report takes significant effort. But it is also a versatile starting point. You can build on it as a foundation or condense it to use in other ways.

By separating the content into different chunks and editing them to serve different channels, you’ll get more reward for all the compiling, writing, editing, designing, and marketing you did.

While your annual report may start as a 40-page PDF or microsite, it doesn’t have to end there. Each part can work together to serve different functions. Turn it into a brochure that can live online or be printed. Each section or story can be repurposed and published as its own blog post, or in snippets on social media. You can even pull lines from the report into emails and presentations.

Numbers on their own are important, but they’re even more powerful when communicated alongside stories of impact. A 22% increase in donations feels more tangible when you tell the stories of how the funds helped specific people and communities.

And once you’ve crafted these stories, you can use them again and again on your website and in presentations to communicate your organization’s impact instead of creating new content each time the need arises.

ESG stands for environmental, social and governance, and it’s set of practices used to evaluate a company’s operational performance as it relates to social and environmental impact. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lay out a global blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.

Increasingly, investors are factoring ESG performance into their decisions about who and what to fund. If you’ve publicly made a commitment to your organization’s ESG, your annual report is the place to publish your rating and any progress you’ve made (or need to make). What you publish in your annual report will help investors make a decision about your organization.

An annual report is also the place to showcase your commitment to or progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. If your organization’s work ties into one or more of the SDGs, your impact report is where you can clearly communicate your impact to date and outline your plans for the coming year.

If you’ve made commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at your organization, in your report you can showcase policies and programs that demonstrate progress in those areas and identify where to improve.

If your organization is a Certified B Corp, like Briteweb, combine your B Corp Impact Report with your Annual Report.

By publishing your annual report digitally, you’ll be giving your reader multiple opportunities to engage with the content. They can click on links as they go through the report, allowing them to dive deeper into specific project or program areas, financials, and case studies, and to learn more about your organization and your team. You can enhance your impact storytelling by embedding video and audio, too.

And by weaving in calls-to-action via in-text links or buttons, you’ll give your supporters a seamless way to donate in the moment, instead of hoping they’ll go searching for the donate page after they’ve finished reading the report.

An interactive experience is also less likely to be overwhelming to consume because it lets you sort your content into drawers that your readers can open to reveal (you’ll see what we mean in the Global Communities report below).

If you want to highlight a regional achievement, create an interactive map where your reader clicks on the region or country to reveal more information or text about that area.

While a digital report might be a larger investment upfront, you can refresh it each year with unique branding and messaging. Your team will save resources in subsequent years when they avoid starting from scratch. Need some inspiration? Browse the The Impact Reporting Archive.

An annual report shows your impact over the past year. Don’t forget to include a roadmap for the future to demonstrate how you’ll build upon your performance.

You’ll get clients, donors, key voices and investors excited about joining you on your journey as you continue to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

By infusing impact into your annual report, you’ll communicate accountability and transparency (as well as your culture, vision and mission) all in one place, making it easy to share with your communities.

Ready to work on your annual report?