Designing an Annual Report for Investors and Stakeholders
During a creative round in the studio today, an interesting question came up. We had already established with the client the year’s messaging and developed themes and potential titles for the report.
The question was ‘Should the imagery/content for the cover of the report illustrate what the organisation does, who the client’s customers are or focus on what the stakeholder and investors want to see?’.
Good question.
Like all good questions, the answer is ‘depends’.
In the first instance, an annual report is focused primarily on stakeholders and investors. They are your primary audience (we talk about maximising your report and audience in other articles), so question answered. Right?
The answer is more complex than that, so let’s dig down a little deeper. Using a bank as an example – the question is – should the cover imagery (we will take photography in this case) focus on what the organisation does, in this case, provide financial services to SMEs, or: illustrate the organisation’s client base, or: should it focus on the year's results?
Some of these are easier to visualise than others, the easiest being showing various SME business owners going about their business; florists, engineers and cafes, for instance. You can imagine tattooed baristas and people wearing goggles, can’t you?
In our example, showing what our bank does is a little more complex, but it can be done using case study images of members of the team engaging with real-life clients, delivering solutions to their financial needs. Maybe showing a consultation, the APP or similar might do the trick.
When focusing on the stakeholder and investors’ concerns, copy and report titles (or ‘themes’, we talk about this more in this article) play a bigger role. For instance, the copy or title for the report might read ‘Delivering financial services to 10,000 businesses’. Although that is of course a bit dull, you get the idea. This might be illustrated with a montage of hundreds of different businesses along with a more interesting report title than the one above!
In the case of our SME bank, the ideal solution would be to illustrate all three. But that is not easy.
By focusing purely on investors, the board, senior management and investors etc, the covers of the report can become a little sterile and lose personality, or in this instance, the human touch, which is very important to the client.
So when answering this question to the creative team, the answer has to be ‘the cover should communicate what we do, who we do it for and the results we have achieved this year’. ‘We’ being the bank, of course. Not easy, but if it was easy, everybody could do it.
To put it another way ‘This year XYZ bank helped XXX number of small businesses to…’
I think it is safe to say that the internal pages of an annual report are where the focus is on reporting and the cover should evoke the personality of the organisation a little more. We talk about illustrating the human aspect of an organisation as being important and it is. Every organisation has a human aspect and readership will always connect with that.
We can ‘weave’ into the more detailed reporting pages of the human story, in what we call the ‘front end’.
Having said all this, sometimes a report is only about the financial results of the year and not much else. You often find this when dealing with government bodies, ombudsmen and inspectorate, for instance (see the Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary example), but even then, strong design and quality reporting using infographics make all the difference.
So what is the final answer? Well, the cover design should not be compromised at the expense of the organisation's personality and client base. The reporting should not be compromised when communicating with stakeholders, investors and potential investors.
None of this is a barrier to effective communication – it’s just a good question.