Don't put your annual report (only) on your website!
It's that time of year when lots of annual reports are hitting our mailboxes and, increasingly, are being put on organizations' websites, too.
If you're among those nonprofits that have chosen to save money by going to cyberspace instead of print, you've made a big mistake..
Making that choice reminds me of bumping into a friend who was on his knees frantically searching for something on his front porch.
“What are you looking for?” I asked, bending down to help him. “My car keys,” he answered. “I lost them in my hallway,” he said, pointing into his house.
“Then why are you looking out here?”
“The light’s better!”
If you’re putting your annual report on your website only so you can save printing costs, like my fictional friend, you are (mostly) wasting your time.
You’re making the would-be reader work way too hard
Yes, a good annual report can be on the costly side, and that’s why we generally reserve them for our most important audiences: donors, prospective donors, community leaders, influential partners, people who bring us business, etc. We want to point out the year’s achievements, show our ability to say ‘thank you’, and define our continuing vision for the future.
Here are two realities. One, it’s harder for you to find and keep a generous donor/partner/prospector than it is for them to find a nonprofit to support. And two, most of the folks in this category tend to be older than 45. Which means they like books. With beginnings, middles, and ends.
Back to your annual report, which you’ve just moved from my mailbox to your website. I predict your cost savings are false, because only those people with the most incentive (and they are woefully few) will ultimately read your online version.
Think about the hoops you’ll put them through. Instead of receiving a beautiful copy right in their mailbox to thumb through, they get a postcard or maybe just an e-mail telling them that the annual report is available on your website. Sure, you tell them that you’re saving the organization important dollars that can now be used for direct services. Fine, they think to themselves, I barely read it anyway.
Let’s say your postcard or e-mail was really, really compelling. (It was, wasn’t it? Cause what’s their incentive otherwise?) Is the annual report easy to find, linked right on the home page? Because you know they lost that postcard in about five minutes. You didn’t advertise it on the home page? Strike two.
Design it for the internet or don’t bother
Ah, the annual report, designed for print publication. You wisely saved it in PDF so it can be opened by (almost) anybody. My 65-year-old donor is certain to have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, isn’t s/he? And sports a large enough computer monitor to enjoy the gorgeous two-page spreads my designer labored over?
Of course, s/he will want to print out the entire 42/64/80/96-page document in full color on her/his high quality laser printer to read it at her/his leisure, and then perhaps bind it in a small notebook to put on the shelf for reference in future years.
(Chuckle, chuckle.)
What were you thinking?
Of course there’s a place for annual reports on the web, and other advice
The day will come when your favorite donors no longer think in a linear fashion, when everyone has an inexpensive home bookbinding device, and we no longer look to the mail for anything.
Until that time, people you are trying to impress will still love to get invitations, newsletters, annual reports, and handwritten letters in the mail, and you are well advised to acknowledge that trend.
Sorry, you still have to spend the money. I’ve been finding for some nonprofits that you can save money by stop printing separate brochures. Increase the print run of your annual report instead to get a lower per-unit cost and hand them out instead. The information will be better and more complete.
That said, of course you should have a low-resolution PDF of your annual report on your website for every graduate student researching your organization, for every consultant (like me) doing his or her due diligence, and, yes, for every stray high-tech would-be partner who comes on to your site at 3 a.m. looking for information about your nonprofit before ever contacting you in person.
More importantly, the information in your annual report – financials, programs, staff, board members, donors, wonderful stories, testimonials, mission, history, and so on – should always be presented in fresh and up-to-date in classic website format (don’t forget to read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think on website design; review on my website).
Another way to get folks to read your annual report: survey them right after you mail it
One last tip. Here’s an inexpensive way to find out how people liked your last annual report and/or to get them to read it. Survey them. At my last job, we used one of the online survey tools which we “rented” for a month. About five days after we thought everyone should have the annual report in their hands, we sent a simple 10-question survey to the roughly 30% of recipients for whom we also had e-mail addresses: how long did you spend reading the annual report, what did you like best, what did you like least; etc.
There was a nice side effect. We’re pretty sure that people who had put the annual report aside picked it up to answer the survey. Nothing we could do about the people who had already thrown it away. Oh, well.
See you next month!
