The theme and messaging for your annual report
Establishing a theme for an annual report delivers a far more engaging solution for stakeholders. Discovering what that theme for the year might be is part of the process we take before we begin the creative process.
An approach we take at Navig8 is to consult with the client’s annual report delivery team on the highlights of the year or a particular theme, to establish something they wish to communicate to their stakeholders.
A ‘theme’ can be a number of things but essentially, we are looking to define the overall message the organisation wants to communicate from the year’s activities. We ask questions like:
What was the significant achievement or delivery?
What was your focus?
Was it about people or products?
Describe in words the year’s activities
And so on.
It is important to get some key people around the table. These include the CEO, CFO, Marketing Director and Head of Strategy. These people have insight on the year's activities and the feedback they give will help develop the creative brief.
What, as an agency, we are trying to discover is the key message for the year; what you want the stakeholders (and potential investors) to understand, right from the cover.
During a recent project consultation, we were given absolute clarity by the client’s team. The organisation had delivered on their strategy and become profitable, in a much shorter space of time than they had expected. This is very good news for the investors and good news for us because we know what story we need to tell. In short, ‘Strategy. Delivered.’
The financial results don’t belong in a detailed sense, as part of the overarching messaging for the cover of the report. The top-level figures can be illustrated in the highlights section.
We take the information from these kick off meetings and send them back to the client for a final review. There are often many voices in a meeting and messages can get confused. As this is a process of establishing clarity, it is our job to organise the feedback into a coherent set of messages – ready for the creative team.
The results from our initial meeting deliver a list of keywords or ‘sound bites’. We filter out the ‘noise’ and drill down to the core issues. Clients tend to want to say too much, they try to communicate too many things. It is our job to help them focus their mind. This is why you need the senior team on the call. The bigger the organisation, the harder that is.
Working with an LSE (London Stock Exchange) listed company may mean some of the senior team can’t engage at this level. As an agency, we press to get the highest level engagement. It creates buy-in at an early stage and helps to remove barriers later.
The next stage inevitably requires some copywriting for the report’s cover. We include this as part of our creative fee. Some designers don’t feel confident knocking out copies, some do. The job of the art director is to guide the designer – inspire them and get them to consider relevant, creative solutions – focused on the theme.
The process not only delivers a more creative, focused solution, but it can also help the client’s content team focus on their own narrative. The ideal result is to ‘weave’ the theme throughout the report’s ‘front end’ content.
It is easy to put a picture of a digger on the cover of an annual report and include the standard headline ‘Annual report and financial statements’. It is much harder to capture the ‘essence’ and achievements from the past year using images and text. That is why a client goes to a creative agency.