The Better Business Writing Blog

5 Steps to Annual Report Greatness

19/4/2017

A great annual report can really boost your corporate reputation.
The following tips show you how.

1. Grab 'em by the pupils

Although Wordience specialises in business writing, even we recognise the real force behind great annual reports:

Great graphic design.

Visual impact is the hammer that cracks the nut of reader attention. So make sure you get a great designer on board from the outset, one who knows how to draw reader attention to all the important points of your report, one who understands how readers engage with and absorb visual content.

Of course, once you've done that you'll need to ...

2. Grab 'em by the mind

A reader knows in seconds whether they're going to read, skim or just avoid your report. So if your annual report contains information that stakeholders absolutely need to know, then you owe it to your company to make sure it gets read.

Message development and delivery is too important to leave to contributors who may not have communications expertise. Finance and legal teams are great at ... well, finance and legal. While annual reports rely on specialist finance and legal input, they deserve to be readable and understandable by non-specialists. And for that you need a business writer.

Like anything, good writing takes time to do well. As well as dramatically improving your content, having a specialist business writer on board allows your team to concentrate on the individual strengths they're bringing to the report.

And, as with your graphic designer, the sooner you get a good writer engaged in designing your message structure and strategy, the better received your annual report is going to be.

3. Show off your personality

Your annual report is one of the centrepieces of your company culture. It shares with the world your mission, your strengths, your achievements, your standards, and your dreams for the future.

All these elements combine to create a company's personality. And it's this personality that transforms an otherwise dry-as-dust assembly of numbers and facts into a story that comes to life for each of your stakeholders.

While annual reports are serious documents, seriousness is easy to overdo. Your annual report contains a wealth of information. Don't short-change your readers by making it bland and dull to read.

4. Be ruthless with your style

Whether you have a penchant for the Oxford comma or a preference for 'program' over 'programme,' you need to establish a writing style for your annual report and then stick to it. Ruthlessly.

Although correct usage is fundamental, this is not about setting your company up as an authority on modern English grammar. Rather, it's about being consistent.

Study after study* shows that poor quality or inconsistent writing undermines readers' confidence in a business. Worse, many of the companies surveyed don't rate themselves as being terribly good at either of these things. So what can your company do to improve?

The first step is to decide what consistency looks like - for example, when do you use numerals, when do you spell numbers out? - and then document your decisions in a style guide**. The second step is simply to stick with these decisions ...

... and refuse coffee to those who won't comply.

5. Start herding the cats

Annual reports are complex to pull together, so good project planning is fundamental to the process. The earlier in the cycle you marshal your resources, the better your result is going to be.

Which makes this the easy bit.

Assign clear responsibilities against a well-defined schedule. Take realistic account of how long it will take people to contribute, edit, and approve all the material. And then get the Company Whip to make sure those contributions keep coming.

So now you know what you've got to do, maybe it's time to get started. After all, June 30 is just around the next bend ...

Time to give Wordience a call?