Writing an Annual Report

An annual report records an important period in the life of an organisation. It may be read by members, clients, funders, partners, employees, volunteers, governing bodies or the general public, and different readers will be looking for different information.

The challenge is deciding what they need to know. An annual report should give an accurate account of the year without becoming a record of everything everybody in the organisation happened to do.

Decide What the Report Is For

Before collecting contributions, decide what the finished report needs to achieve. An organisation required to report formally to members or a governing body may have different obligations from one producing a public report for supporters, partners or other interested readers.

There may also be information that must be included for legal, regulatory, contractual or funding reasons. Establish those requirements before deciding on the rest of the content.

Once the essentials are clear, you can decide what additional information will give the reader a useful picture of the year.

Report What Happened, Not Everything That Happened

A year generates a great deal of information. Meetings were held, projects continued, events took place, people joined and left, money was spent and countless smaller decisions were made.

Not all of it belongs in the annual report.

Concentrate on the activities, developments and results that matter. What changed during the year? What was achieved? What did not go as planned? Were there important decisions, difficulties or developments that affected the organisation?

Selection is part of writing the report. Leaving out routine detail does not make the account incomplete if that detail adds nothing useful to the reader's understanding.

Give Figures Some Meaning

Numbers can make an annual report more informative, but only when the reader understands what they represent. Membership increased by 12 percent. Attendance reached 8,000. Fifty projects were completed. Those figures may be significant, but the significance is not always obvious on its own.

Comparisons can provide useful context. A figure may mean more when compared with the previous year, an agreed target or another relevant measure.

Be careful, however, not to turn every number into evidence of success. If a figure needs qualification or there is an obvious reason for an unusual result, explain it.

Be Honest About the Difficult Parts

An annual report is naturally an opportunity to record achievements, but credibility suffers if every difficulty is converted into a triumph.

Projects can be delayed. Targets can be missed. Funding can change. Membership can fall. An initiative may simply not work as expected. If something significant affected the year, it is usually better to explain it clearly than to hide it behind vague language.

A professional report can acknowledge a problem while also explaining what was learned, what action was taken or what will happen next.

Bring Different Contributions Together

Annual reports are often assembled from material supplied by several people. One person writes two paragraphs, another sends three pages, somebody provides a table and somebody else submits last year's text with a few new figures.

Those contributions are source material, not necessarily finished sections of the report.

Before publication, the document needs to be read as a whole. Repetition can be removed, terminology made consistent and sections brought into proportion. Important information should not disappear simply because one contributor wrote less than another.

Remember the Reader Wasn't at the Meetings

People inside an organisation accumulate knowledge throughout the year. They know the names of projects, committees, programmes and departments. They remember why a particular decision was important and what happened six months before it was made.

The reader may know none of that.

Check abbreviations, internal terminology and references to previous events. Give enough context for the information to make sense without requiring the reader to know the organisation as well as the people who wrote the report.

Check the Report as a Whole

An annual report contains many opportunities for small errors to become embarrassing ones. Names, dates, financial figures, percentages, job titles, project names and statistics may appear in several places. Check that they agree.

Also look at the balance of the document. A minor activity should not occupy five pages simply because somebody supplied five pages of text, while an important development receives a single paragraph.

The finished report should leave the reader with a clear and accurate understanding of the organisation's year: what it did, what happened as a result and where it stands now.