How Every Nonprofit Can Make Their Annual Report Work Harder
Sep 14th, 2009 by David Svet
Aren’t annual reports beautiful documents? They’re the top of the food chain among printed business documents — lush, rich, and elegant. I recently saw one from a community benefit organization that had been entered in a design competition. It was gorgeous. It had beautiful paper, fantastic photography, the finest printing, and truly exceptional graphic design. It was a stellar piece. It had the letter from the executive director talking about the year’s accomplishments followed by stories and photo essays of the charitable work that had been done. There was a financial section showing the obligatory 10% of revenue spent on fundraising and finally there was the donor list in rank order from big money to modest. It had everything it needed to win the design competition. But I think it was a complete failure. It didn’t do the three things that need to happen before a donor is asked to donate again: thank each donor by name, explain where their money went, and explain the outcome of the investment.
Impossible? Nope. But wouldn’t you need to print an annual report for each donor showing their philanthropic profile and results in it? Yes. All quite possible, reasonable, affordable, and remarkably effective. Every community benefit organization that can produce a high level annual report is tracking their donor data with some form of donor database such as Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge or Salesforce.com. Using the data to report back to the donor is a reasonable request.
Variable data printing makes it possible. The contents of a donor database can be used to drive the content of individual printed pieces that are produced using a digital press. Most printers have the capability to do this, although most won’t have tried to print an annual report using variable data. The systems are generally used for direct mail. However, it’s not terribly different to produce an annual report — even if you only produce a few pages digitally. So it is possible to give a heartfelt thank you to each donor with a very explicit explanation of the exact amount of their donation(s) reported along with the outcome of their gift. They can have their name on the cover, the executive director’s letter written to them, and each of the designated projects that they supported highlighted in front of all the other work the organization performed. The result is a donor base that is very satisfied that they made a good decision and were recognized for their generosity. You can make it happen by simply taking two things that you already do and combining them. The result is exponentially powerful.
Great point and I think the donor would be much happier to know where their money went.
Dave -
A quick note about report design (I know, this diverges a bit from your point): It’s interesting how a well-designed and printed report automatically garners higher credibility and expectations for the organization that produces it. What about the small nonprofits that can’t afford a graphic designer, or even send the report out in hard copy form? Just a thought about how we still judge books by their cover - whether or not the content is relevant or does the job it should for donors and other constituents. Agreed.
Luise
More often than not, I see organizations that don’t understand the difference between can’t afford and won’t afford. Most of the organizations that tell me they can’t afford to produce something that’s respectable are actually saying they would rather put the money toward their cause — a classic over extension of growth that I covered in this post: http://spurspectives.com/profit-vs-growth-why-so-many-community-benefit-organizations-struggle/
I agree, a slickly produced piece can cover up a multitude of sins, and that’s wrong. But I’ve also seen a lot of very compelling pieces done on a shoestring. The trick is choosing to do it.