The Two Parts of an Annual Report

This week we sent annual reports for Cobb Community Foundation and West Central Initiative to the printer.

If you’ve ever been involved in producing one, you know how much sweat goes into it. Months of gathering stories, chasing down photos, refining language, debating which numbers matter most, and adjusting layouts until everything finally lands in the right place. We're talking pieces that are usually 20-36 pages in length.

Mike, our creative director, designed both of these reports. He’s been my partner in the trenches of storytelling for more than 13 years now. Between the two of us—and the team around us—we’ve produced dozens of annual reports and thousands of pages of community stories. (Shout out to our chief cat herder Caitlin for managing many of them!)

When the final file goes to the printer, there’s always a moment of relief.

And then part two of the situation appears. Because there are really two aspects to an annual report.

The first is what’s inside it.

Most of the time, the stories are strong. Interviews, photos, and careful writing usually produce some of the best storytelling an organization creates all year.

The second is who actually sees it.

When organizations first come to us for this kind of project, they usually have a mailing list of a few hundred households. It’s an important audience—board members, major donors, long-time supporters.

But it’s also a very small audience.

Which means some of the best storytelling an organization produces all year ends up sitting inside a report that lands on the kitchen counters of a relatively small group of people. And only a fraction of them open it.

Now, to be clear, the report itself isn’t the problem. In fact, the stories inside are usually excellent.

The real question is what happens next.

Because if the annual report is the only place those stories appear, they fade pretty quickly.

(Sidebar tip: if you're thinking, “We’ll just email the whole PDF or paste the full report into an e-newsletter,” I have an unfortunate piece of news. Almost no one reads it that way.)

What does work is breaking those stories apart and letting them show up—one at a time—through the places where people actually pay attention.

A story becomes a social post. A photo resurfaces a few weeks later. A statistic shows up in an email. A board member repeats the example in a conversation.

Over time, those small moments start to add up.

Organizations often assume that if they produce a strong piece of communication, awareness will follow. A well-written annual report. A compelling video. A newsletter.

But awareness doesn’t usually grow that way. It grows through repetition and reinforcement.

The same idea shows up again and again. A familiar story surfaces in different places. Gradually, people begin to recognize the work. The explanation gets easier. The understanding starts to stick.

The annual report is often where the stories are first told. But it’s not where awareness is built. That happens when the stories continue showing up.

Because if the annual report is the only place those stories appear, they don't start to register.

The organizations that build awareness tend to repeat their stories until they feel like a broken record. Repeat, repeat, repeat. They show up again in posts, emails, presentations, and conversations.

At some point staff will be bored silly of saying the same thing. That’s usually about the moment the outside world begins to understand it.

Lori