Annual Reports. The annual obligation for many organisations that feels like a marathon of herding cows. Long hours put into gathering statistics from the past twelve months, and late-night editing of long-form copy to make sense to investors.
And if you’re still printing your report, there’s the added stress (and cost) of mailing out documents that people probably just flip through until they find their name on the donor list. Perhaps, it might even go straight into the recycling bin.
But what if you could turn your annual report into something more useful, like a marketing tool to promote your organisation? You get to use it to engage your audience all year long. It becomes something exciting, for both readers and users, and for you the creators. It could even be engaging and interactive that people will share on their socials.
Benefits of Going All-out Digital
There are so many possibilities with a digital annual report, and no, we don’t mean having it as just a .pdf document uploaded online.
An effective report is, in essence, a microsite with a unique URL for you to share (and drive readers directly to it). It’s creating an experience for users to interact with your content.
There are some high-level perks to publishing your report digitally, and they include:
- Reducing carbon footprint. Going green and cutting your corporation’s environmental impact? Going digital makes for a great leap forward. It tells your stakeholders that you’re going paperless and saving trees, and that helps create a positive image.
- Delve deeper into stories. With print, you are limited by the page. Every single printed page adds expense. However, by going digital, you can let your imagination flow. Tell those stories of your company’s accomplishments over the past year. Go on and add images and colours (and even videos).
- Improve your SEO. One aspect that search engines utilise is active links between trusted sites. Your report should link out to your website, and vice versa. Any earned media should also direct people to your report, which in turn can lead more viewers to your site.
- Feature media-rich content. As mentioned in an earlier point, you are now not bound by the limit of text and images. Going digital means your report can contain animations, interactions and videos to grab the user’s attention.
Getting Readers to Take Action
If your digital annual report is compelling enough, you will inspire people to take corresponding actions. What they do is entirely up to you and your marketing goals.
You can lead them to sign up for your newsletter, visit your website, share the report, or even make a donation. A single click can turn a passive reader into an active participant, or maybe a volunteer, customer, or advocate.
Never quite thought of pushing your best-selling product of the year via the annual report? You now can. Or wanting that one-time donor to continue supporting your non-profit? Make it an easy move through the digital report.
Engage with Design
A digital annual report is a unique platform for your organisation to tell stories. And even better, is to use smart and creative design to showcase these stories.
Consider what the most effective presentation of a story might be. Perhaps a slideshow with animation to show numbers and progress. Or narrate a long-form story through a magazine-style layout. Got exciting interviews (in the form of podcasts or videos) with selected partners or beneficiaries? Embed them into the digital report!
No need for scanning QR codes to bring interesting content to life anymore.
Measure User’s Interest through Analytics
With printed annual reports, you’re sending them off into an informational void. Most organisations don’t have a good way of learning if the report was received, or if it was opened and read. There’s no way to know what grabbed people’s interest.
A digital annual report on the other hand, when connected to an analytics platform, will provide you with a treasure chest of useful information.
See how many people opened the report for your email campaign, if they were referred through media or social media platforms. You can also track how long they spent engaging with the content, which pages they visited (and revisited), and where they dropped off.
You may also learn if they shared the report (or selected sections) on their social media channels, or if they clicked over to your website after reading the report.
All this information helps you better utilise the report as a marketing tool and see what information resonates with your audience. It will also help with making informed changes for future years’ reports and allows for effective tracking of the changes, which will result in wise spending decisions and a higher return on investment.
Take a look at Temasek Foundation’s digital annual report to witness the dynamism of going digital.
Step Up Digitally Today
While digital annual reports may require higher skill levels to craft, it yields benefits exponentially in diverse ways. It’s time to consider going digital for your company’s annual report and experience the difference.
Still unsure about how to get to it? Be in contact with us at I Concept today, if you’re up for something exciting. Our multidisciplinary team of creative designers and digital copywriters will be on hand to help take your brand’s annual report to the next digital level.
