Top tips for your annual report

Annual reports are an important record of the triumphs, challenges, efforts and future areas of focus for many organisations.

Annual reports enable organisations to acknowledge and learn from their achievements, issues and financial analysis to progress projects and improve processes into the future. But they can be time consuming.

True North project manages the writing, design and editing as a seamless process so annual report projects are as easy and streamlined as possible.

We have put together some tips on how to bring the best out of your organisation’s year in an annual report.

Top tip

Make sure you know what you are reporting against for your annual report. Use an existing framework, such as your organisation’s strategic plan, corporate objectives, community plan or key performance indicators.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Each year your organisation records the highlights and achievements in media releases, speeches, social media posts, newsletters and project updates. These sources are rich with content for the annual report and provide the milestones and achievements sometimes forgotten over the year.

 Make a record as you go

Start saving photos and recording milestones and achievements into a folder as they happen during the year to help you remember if something happened in July and not May or June the year before.

Good quality, big photos

Make sure you save the photos you want to use in the annual report as big as possible – they need to be at least 1MB in size to be high resolution and look good in the printed version. Avoid photos that are low resolution (anything in KB). If someone sends in a low resolution photo, ask them to send you the original size, which even if taken with a mobile phone, should be 1MB – 2MB.

Focus on people stories

Not all annual reports are fun to read, but they can be made more interesting by including people stories from different projects and milestones throughout the year. People stories create good photo opportunities so think about including training, professional development, team building or social activities.

Be realistic about timelines

Make sure you leave enough time to have the content approved to be sent to the writer/editor and then provided to the designer. Some designers can charge late fees if they are left waiting for content they have previously scheduled as a priority over other work.

Work out how long a piece of string is

Knowing how much content to include in the annual report can vary from year to year, but it is good practice to have a final page count for the design version. This helps guide what will or won’t fit in the annual report so the page numbers don’t blow out during the design stage. Most designers provide a page rate for additional pages, but remember this may not include the additional content writing.

Commit to the final design ‘look and feel’

When you approve the final design ‘look and feel’ of the document, the designer will apply this to all of the annual report content so it is consistent. Any changes to the ‘look and feel’ after the designer starts laying out the content creates unnecessary and often expensive author’s corrections. The following elements of the look and feel need to be approved before the designer starts the lay-out – heading style, body copy style, bullet points, break out boxes, margins, graphs and charts, section breaks, icons and overall design elements such as columns and widths.