Annual Report smooth delivery
Delivering any type of report can be a difficult job, but even more so; an annual report. This article briefly details the ‘hazards’ that can make life a little harder for everyone and the best practices for delivering one smoothly.
Following these guidelines will make the client’s experience less stressful, help the agency deliver the best possible result and most likely save money. Who could ask for more?
Schedules
Your agency should work with you to establish a schedule before project commencement. Things to consider when building a schedule are:
Allow enough time for the creative round. If it is the first time the agency has engaged with the client, there may be a need for an additional round.
If you have requested proofreading, you will not only need to allow time for the proofreader to do their job but also time to review their suggestions.
Remember the first full proof will take the agency a while to produce.
As an agency, we expect things to change. If we need to make up time, it is a shared responsibility.
Some timescales can’t be squeezed, like print and fulfillment.
Creative brief
We will request a creative brief. When responding, particularly if you and your team have a specific view, we need to know. This is particularly important when you supply content. We often hear from a client, after we have styled content, that they had expected XYZ to be a table or an infographic. That’s fine, but we need to know beforehand.
Agreeing design templates
After the creative round, we will present designs that show how typical text pages will look, the financial statements and styles for tables, charts and diagrams. It is important to review these carefully, once approved, we set these designs as templates and styles that underpin the design of the whole report. Changing your mind later will most likely cause additional work.
Try not to direct the design yourselves, leave the designers to the design. If you are not happy with something, explain why – we will fix it.
Content supply
Supplying content in an efficient way is one of the biggest ways you can ensure (as a client) that you will get a report free from errors and avoid misunderstandings. Below are the key things to delivering quality content:
Supply the content in one go, it is OK to separate the front end from the back end, but provide the content in the order you want the final report to be in.
Ensure your documents are styled consistently. It will not always be obvious what a headline, subhead, or sub-subhead will be unless your content is consistent. Ideally use predefined styles in Word. Ie. H1, H2 etc. We need to easily see the typographic hierarchy.
Make sure everything is supplied as ‘live text’. This means that it is editable so that we can copy and paste it. This is particularly important with embedded graphics and diagrams. If the original source came from PowerPoint, supply the original source documents. If we have to type it in, it will not only cost more, it will likely introduce errors. We understand that content for an annual report comes from a myriad of sources, but save time and errors by getting it to us in a way we can use effectively.
When supplying financial data and in particular data for charts and diagrams, exclude any data that is not relevant. You may be clear on what needs to be included, but we may not. Clean out things like % from the data, the reason is when we import the data the chart generation software will not recognise the data with £ or % symbols.
Avoid sending content over multiple emails, it will slow the process and more than likely lead to omission and errors. It is tempting to send over content as you get it and drip feed content, but it really isn’t a good idea.
When you supply photographic images, make sure they are of sufficient resolution. It’s easy to just chuck them over and hope for the next, but by doing that it will only mean later down the line we will be coming back requesting high-resolution images or last-minute replacements. If you are supplying a jpeg it will need to be at least 300 dpi when used at its actual size, or as a guide more than 500 MB.
It’s the same with logos. Low-resolution pngs, gifs, or jpegs will not be of sufficient quality. Take time to get the best formats before supplying, these are EPS or AI.
Content supply timing
It is tempting to provide content early so that the designers can ‘get started’. This is almost certainly a false economy. Draft content is useful to see early on, giving the design team an early understanding of what to expect. But providing the content too early can mean a massive set of revisions in the early stages, or worse, resupplying the content later. That will without doubt mean additional charges as work must be done again, from scratch.
Speak to your agency, establish how long it will take to create the first full proof and wait until the content is ‘as near as damn it’. It will save time in the long run.
A key stage in annual report production is providing content after the auditors have completed their tasks. After the auditors have done what they need to do, the number of potential revisions is vastly reduced. Short of the CEO, Chair and CFO sections which typically require substantial changes, post-auditors review content is in a much better shape and substantially reduces the need for last-minute, late-night revisions.
We will advise you when we establish your schedule when is the optimum time to supply content to hit those deadlines and cut down on iterations.
It cannot be overstated that a resupply of content can cause serious issues in the smooth delivery of an annual report.
A word on Dropbox and other file-sharing platforms. They are great as a single depository place for content, but they do come with their problems. First of all, we do not get any notification that new content has been uploaded. Secondly, it is not always clear where we can find new content. Lastly, many financial institutions, like banks or AIM-listed organisations are not permitted to use file sharing or transfer providers like Wetransfer.com because of security issues. We can advise on a platform that is used by financial institutions and will make your IT department feel secure and safe.
Revisions
There are two practical ways of marking and making revisions; using stickers in Adobe Acrobat or using InCopy, both have their benefits and downsides.
There is a reason why we ask for revisions to be marked using stickies. Revisions are easily located and can be ‘ticked off’, reducing the likelihood of them being missed. By marking up the proof we have a single reference and record of the amends at a milestone stage. The downside is it can be a labour-intensive process for the client.
Using InCopy can be a little daunting to the uninitiated but it is actually very simple. There can be barriers (again perceived security issues) with some organisations.
To use InCopy you will need a DropBox account and an InCopy subscription, which is incredibly cheap.
This is how it works. We upload the report to our DropBox account and send you an invitation to edit. You will then see the report and have access to the edible fields. By checking out to make your amends and checking in to submit them. You can easily edit text and financial data.
However, adding new tables or pages is not possible, we need to do that. It’s great for last-minute changes and cuts out the often hectic little changes that are always necessary.
That’s it. If we work together in this way, the delivery of your annual report will be as smooth as it can possibly be.