Essential elements of a successful annual report

Apart from your stakeholders, the other interested parties like the employees, directors, etc. can also get to know a lot about your company by the annual report. Thus, an annual report is a big opportunity for you, to take your investors through your work accomplishments.

One may however wonder, what does this report actually contains that can prove to be so advantageous to the general public? Let us get to know the fundamental components of a business annual report.

• Accomplishments: Talking about your company achievements may include answering questions like the following:
  • What were the results of your work in the previous year?
  • What differences you could make to the society and your surroundings?
  • Why had you invested your resources (time and money) in the way you did?

Connect your day-to-day activities with your organization’s mission. Your annual report should thus summarize of your achievements, by completing these everyday activities. The report should clearly illustrate the purpose behind the work you do on daily basis, and the difference your company is making by following the business mission.

• Financials: Financial statements can be easily misunderstood. Therefore, unless you have a strong feeling about your company benefitting out of printing your full financial report, you can overlook it. Printing full financials can take up a lot of your space, thus can make the annual reports an expensive affair to design, print and mail.

Rather than making every page of your report count, you can use a graphical interface to just give a short and crisp description, of how you raised and spent the money. Full financials can be thereafter provided upon request.

• Your Organization Story: You may include profiles, pictures, testimonials and anecdotes, in your annual report or an online video – to illustrate behind your organization and its success. This can also include recognizing the contributions and successes of certain important people. The style of writing used here could be in a story-telling format, but where everything stated is truth. You may try describing the scenes in a dramatic manner to help your readers envision the happenings.

• Gratitude: This is one element that should be spread throughout the report, to give your supporters a sense that you are appreciating them as partners for realize all of the yearly accomplishments. Here too, you can use stories, pictures and profiles to convey the message of acknowledgement.

• Action: This may include telling your report readers of ways how they can support and contribute to your organization in future. This should be in the concluding part of the report.

Creating an annual report can appear to be an exhaustive task initially. In addition to the necessary points stated above, if you analyze the annual reports of listed companies for the past 2-3 years, you will realize what other trends and techniques are involved into writing of a powerful and highly impressive report.