Your annual or impact report could be attracting investors, strengthening employee loyalty, and winning new customers. Instead, most reports gather digital dust on a forgotten webpage. Here’s how to fix it and why you need to.
There are some superb organisations out there who are doing incredibly important and transformational work, yet they are missing their big opportunity to shout about it in either their annual or impact report.
Some businesses aren’t even creating these reports. There is probably a lot of “what’s the point” involved in this decision, or that it takes a lot of time and input to pull them together. Aside from a few visionary organisations, most of those who do go to the effort of creating these reports miss out on huge opportunities because of five common mistakes.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with several brilliant companies this year who have taken risks with either their annual report or impact report (I’d love to share, but I sign NDAs with many clients). They’ve already seen the benefits of creating a report that makes an impact with their employees, potential investors, and the people who use their services.
So, here are five mistakes to avoid with annual reports.
1. Making it about the business
Yes, an annual report is absolutely about what’s been achieved in the business during the year. An impact report is also a review of what the business has done and plans to do. However, if you make your annual report about this faceless brand, then it’s not particularly exciting to read. Neither is it going to turn heads when you launch it.
Instead, your report needs to be about the people who matter: your employees, your customers, your wider network. When you adjust the focus this way, it becomes less about a concept and more about telling the stories that matter.
Imagine this: you’ve reduced turnover in your employees this year. You’ve promoted more people internally, and your employee satisfaction rating has gone up a point. Those are all great things which will attract new talent and help keep folks within the business.
You put all of this data in your report, but it’s not going to connect as well as the story about that employee who found out she was pregnant at the start of the year. Her manager created a plan to support her during maternity leave, even letting her know about promotions, and had someone mentor her through the return to work period.
And that story? That hits harder when it’s told by the employee. When she talks about how her life has changed, the worries she had and how she felt juggling the transition. She might even mention how hard it is to find and afford childcare, but how her sense of self-worth means the sacrifice is worthwhile.
That hits harder than the numbers.
Or what about potential investors?
Let’s say you’ve had an increase in productivity and turnover this year. Digging into how that happened and getting the people who made it happen to open up will tell a better story for potential investors.
It helps them see that progress is more than a one-off. It shows how your structures and processes pay off. And why the investments you’ve made in employee learning and development have transformed your bottom line.
There are so many businesses doing good things, but these stories are buried under the weight of “the business”. Digging into why the business is working and what it did that year means talking to different departments, to your customers, to the people you contract and pulling out the meaningful tales of why it works.
Let’s not forget customers here.
Impact reports, especially, can help customers see that it’s not all greenwashing, can hold you to account and challenge cynicism. This helps when people want to build trust in you, it demonstrates transparency, and shows that you’re on a journey.
2. Not collecting stories throughout the year
Normally, the financial year will trigger the annual report. Or a B Corp certification will trigger an impact report. Whatever the moment is in your business, if you’re starting to gather your stories and data at this point, you’re already way behind.
Instead of treating it as an annual project, gather your stories throughout the year. And not just by the marketing department. Data and stories need to come from every aspect of the business. Did a team deliver an outstanding project? Excellent. Let’s get them interviewed there and then, while it’s still fresh in their minds and the evidence is still sitting in their emails or easy to find on their desktop.
Sales team hit targets early? Wonderful. Let’s have a conversation with them and maybe some of your new customers as well.
You won a tender? Fantastic news. After the tender team has got some sleep, let’s chat to them all to find out what went well, what they’d do differently next time and how excited they feel about the new business. And we can get some baseline metrics here to show how the work will make a difference for the client.
Gathering this as part of the everyday will make the job of compiling the annual report or impact report so much easier. It’ll also save you from spending two months chasing down interviews and case studies when everyone’s diaries clash and you’ve got a tight deadline for getting the report out.
The same goes for collecting data throughout the year. If you know what stories you’re likely to tell, you can gather the evidence as you go. The bonus here is that if you plan on entering awards, it makes that process much easier as well, so it’s a double-win.
3. Forgetting who is going to read it
You’d be forgiven for thinking that annual reports are read by some of the people in the company, and that’s it. This is because when most annual reports are developed, one of the first questions of “who is going to read this?” gets missed.
In my latest annual report kick-off meeting, I spent time digging into why the organisation were investing in it, who was going to read it, how they planned to use it, and how it fit into their wider planning and goals. By understanding this, I could write the report for the multiple audiences who would read it: the employees, the volunteers, the customers, potential investors, the board, and the community.
Each of those groups needs to be represented in the stories and the design of the report. By doing this, a usually dry report that gathers dust on the website becomes something more valuable to the business.
Understanding how they planned to use it also meant looking at the format of the report. Was a PDF the best option? Or should this report be a video? How could we make it more accessible for people? Those are all things that usually get left off the consideration when planning reports.
The same applies to impact reports. The readers are usually much broader, and an impact report can be read by potential customers or your peers. When you stop writing the report based on what you want to say and start writing it based on what people want to read, you get more engagement and more people interested in the stories of your business.
4. Forgetting that the report is only the start.
Perhaps the biggest mistake that businesses make with their impact and annual reports is thinking that the report is the end product. It’s not. It’s the starting point. A good report should be used for tenders and pitches, be a part of the internal comms conversations, and create a narrative that people can get behind.
For one of the impact reports I wrote this year, the feedback from the client was that the wider team were really proud. They felt appreciated and that the work they’d done had been seen. It increased the sense of belonging and became a talking point. It also attracted new supporters. People who were unaware of the kind of work this charity was doing or the ways in which they could get involved.
That’s the outcome you want from both your impact report and annual report: to have an actual influence on the business.
5. Publishing it on their website
There’s nothing wrong with publishing your annual and impact reports on your website. In fact, I actively encourage it. The mistake I see organisations make is that they only place it on their annual report page or their impact report page. This is usually linked from the footer, and it kinda gathers dust there.
It’s also one of the biggest missed opportunities. When it comes to publishing the report on your website, you need to look at where it fits into your content flow. For a start, the publication should be on your home page for the duration of the launch (yes, you read that right, the launch of your report). It should then be on all relevant pages where it gets updated.
Unless you have a regulatory reason for having old reports on your website, replace them with a new one each year. The content of the report should reflect over time, as well as sharing future plans. If you feel it’s important, have a depository, but keep an eye on whether people are really accessing the archive.
But if you’re just publishing it on your website, you’re missing out big time.
Launch that report
Reports need a launch plan. You need to know how you’re going to get the most eyes on that as often as possible. This means a big push in the first couple of weeks and then drip-feeding content from the report over your channels until the next one comes out. Yes, you read that right.
A well-written report should come with content that you can share throughout the year, making it much easier for you to tell your brand story. That content doesn’t always need to drive traffic to the report. It can simply help with employer branding or brand awareness.
A recent report gave the client a huge chunk of case studies, stories and data that they could share over the year. It even brought an increase in website traffic and enquiries. Now, when can you say that your last annual report did that?
Get a real ROI from your report
A lot of hard work and investment go into an annual report. That means you need a return on that investment. Often, for organisations, a report is a nice-to-have, a way to shout about the great achievements of the business. Yet, as we’ve seen, the report can be so much more. Whether it’s your annual report or impact report, getting the most out of it takes a different approach.
If you’re ready to find out how I can help with your next report, get in touch below: