Annual Report Design: The Year’s Highlights
Highlight pages in annual reports have become very popular and for good reason. They give a visually engaging overview and translate well into social media and PowerPoint presentations.
There are many different ways of presenting what can be (and should be) a wide range of information. The key thing is to consider a broader range of data rather than just the financial information – what other stories can you tell in your highlights?
Some of the best highlight pages that we have designed do more than deliver the financial data, be it good or bad, they include more emotive information, information that gives a border understanding of an organisation's year of change and development.
What could an organisation include in its highlights page that isn’t financial data?
I think there are three easy wins and all of them stakeholder stakeholder-friendly, my top three are:
Business changes
Staff achievements
ESG results
Each company is different, of course, but with early consultation with the client we, as an agency, can help deliver a deeper and more engaging message.
By looking at alternative highlight material the report’s messaging and tone changes – and only for the better.
The CFO may not be the right person to approach for this kind of reporting. The CEO might be the right person to speak to if you can. If not, the marketing director might have insights. If you can secure the CEO’s vision outside the finance – you are on to a winner.
From a graphic design agency perspective, the hard part is ‘selling’ the value of this kind of reporting to the management team.
If anything has happened over the last ten years in corporate reporting, it is that annual reports have become far more than just financial tools that get lodged at Companies House. The reports now serve a much wider reporting remit, more marketing and comms. I suspect the trend will continue, and I think it should.
A report should be an inclusive (not necessarily in a race or gender way, in this instance) document that reports on the company’s activities.
Segmentation is something that designers and clients might want to consider. For instance, you might want a spread of financial highlights followed by ESG or staff development and wider business achievements for example B Corp or good Business Charter accreditation.
Delivering data that has a broader scope will add to page count, but it will have little or no impact on cost. Bear in mind the reader will be faced with wading through pages of the Directors’ report and endless financial statements and the highlights offer a welcome respite.
When analysing the data, it is a good idea to consult with the client if any particular figures or changes in the business should have more prominence. Some clients want all the top-level figures to be the same size. However, if we can draw out the more important data against the less important, we have a wider scope when it comes to being more creative in the design. This enables the highlights page to become more of an infographic.
If there is the potential to structure the data in a hierarchical way we can create some very impactful infographics or highlight pages in the annual report.
We did this to great effect with the Oxfam annual report by taking a top-level income figure, defining how it was spent and where and then illustrating the impact the aid delivered.
Highlight pages may be becoming the norm, as are timelines, but if there is one message that I want to drive home in this article: think in a bigger, wider aspect in what you want to include in the highlight pages in any report; annual, strategy, impact – everything. Consider a broader set of data types and make those highlight pages the highlight of the annual report.