A Blue Avocado guide to sprucing up your annual report

In the December edition of Blue Avocado Jan Masaoka provides a guide for organizations wishing to spiff up their annual reports to make them more relevant and useful. She writes:

We nonprofits often put a great deal of time and effort into our annual reports, especially compared with how briefly most recipients will look at them.

"The annual report is a comic book," a nonprofit executive once told me. "They look at the picture and glance at the words." The secret reality is that people do four things with a nonprofit annual report. They:

• Read The Letter (typically from the executive director and the board chair)
• Check to see if they're listed (if they're a donor)
• Read the captions on photos
• Look at the financials to see how big you are and if you had a surplus or a deficit.

You know it's true! Yet (with the exception of The Letter) these are the areas that are often done at the last minute and without real thought. So this year, do it differently. Click here to read more.