How to Craft A Well-Written Board Report – Yearly

The end of the year is a time to analyze the past year’s successes and shortcomings, then plan what you’ll do differently next year. Amidst your final fundraising pushes for the year, you’ll need to spend time organizing metrics from the past year and sharing them with the right people.

Your board needs to see this end-of-year data. As part of their everyday duties, your board members need to know where the organization currently stands. Is it doing well financially? Are its programs as impactful as they could be? With a report created specifically for them, your board can analyze what went well and what needs work. That way, they can focus their attention on those areas that need improvement and come up with strategies to address gaps.

Before we get started, let’s answer a pretty important question: what exactly is a board report?

A nonprofit board report pulls together information from different departments and board committees, usually regarding financial and management performance. These reports enable you to contextualize the organization’s performance to obtain board buy-in for next year’s projects and financial needs. It raises issues that need to be addressed and provides your board with materials they can share with their networks to demonstrate your cause’s impact.

If you’ve written a board report before, great! You already have an idea of what you need to include and how to present it effectively. If this is your first time creating one, a few best practices will help take away the stress from creating your annual report. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What to Include in Your Report
• How to Organize Your Board Report
• How to Present Your Report to the Board

You need to keep your board members updated on your mission and gain their confidence. That’s why developing effective board reports is an important skill that’s thankfully easy to master. Let’s dive in!

What To Include in Your Report

With modern nonprofit technology, your organization gathers a lot of information everyday. The last thing you want is to overload your board report with too much information. You want to give board members the information they actually need to make better, more informed decisions.

Let’s walk through what you should consider when pulling together the information your board members need to know.

Fundraising Data

Although board members may resist getting involved in fundraising, they play a crucial role in your development efforts. There are many fundraising stats you’ll want to share with board members, particularly regarding:

• Revenue streams. Along with your development team, the board should know what fundraising methods are bringing in the most (and least) revenue. Break it down into the total amount raised and what percentage each source brought in. This might include contributions made via your online donation form, direct mail, grants, text message, and more. Understanding what revenue streams perform well and which need some extra attention will help your board determine what to focus on next year and during your end-of-year push.
• Retention. Nonprofits can often get too focused on acquiring new supporters. Instead, we should be looking at whether our current ones are sticking around. How does your donor retention rate compare to similar organizations? Did it increase compared to last year? If you run a member-based organization, you might instead focus on membership renewal. If supporters aren’t sticking around, the board will know to step in to brainstorm new engagement and appreciation ideas.
• Corporate giving. Corporate philanthropy is a major buzzword right now. Companies are fully aware that the public’s eye is on them, so many of them support worthwhile causes to increase customer loyalty. Share data regarding how much potential revenue is available to your organization through corporate giving vs. how much you actually received over the past year. This will primarily include matching gifts and volunteer grants. If your fulfillment rate is low, board members can come up with solutions to help boost those numbers, between educating donors and reaching out to eligible ones.

There are plenty of other basic fundraising metrics that you’ll want to consider including in your annual board report, such as progress toward fundraising goals, programmatic performance, rate of lapsed donors, and average donation amount.

When choosing the financial information you share (or any information for that matter), it’s important to be honest and clear with the board about what went well and what didn’t. Being fully transparent will help board members understand where the organization currently stands and where it’s headed.

Marketing Insights

Promotional efforts help you connect with new audiences and stay connected with your current one. If your board approved new marketing initiatives or voted to increase the marketing budget, it’s important for them to know if that was money well spent. Your annual board report is a perfect opportunity to have the board dig into that data.

Salsa’s nonprofit KPIs guide dives into several marketing metrics you should track throughout the year. Here are a few that you should share in your annual board report:

• Engagement by channel. Similar to how you can break down revenue by channel, share metrics regarding how well each marketing channel is performing. This primarily means looking at online channels such as email and social media. For your email campaigns, this may include open, click-through, and opt-out rates. For social media, this might mean likes, shares, comments, and overall impressions.
• Conversion rates. This is the percentage of people who take a certain action based on your marketing appeals. Common examples include donating, signing up to volunteer, or registering for an event. You can analyze any channel for this. If conversion rates are underperforming, determine whether your CTA buttons use impactful, clear language. Maybe the copy isn’t concise enough, and people abandon the message halfway through. Or maybe you’re delivering messages to the wrong audience altogether and should reanalyze your segmentation strategies. Your board can take a look and help discover what’s impacting this.
• Marketing investment. Board members will likely want to know how much is being spent on marketing. After all, part of their duty is to make sure the organization is using its funds responsibly. What’s more, they likely want to know the ROI for your marketing efforts. They can determine if the organization should cut back in certain areas, or they can up the marketing budget for promotional strategies that are highly effective and bring in revenue.

Knowing what matters to your board and organization will help you narrow down what marketing data to share. For instance, if you previously set a goal to increase your social media engagement and the numbers show that you did, you should emphasize it in your report. Your board will know that the steps they took worked.

How To Organize Your Board Report

More organizations have shifted the majority of their efforts online in response to the pandemic. This makes it easy to gather the information you need and put it in a convenient digital report. Not to mention, this will save time when it comes to actually formatting it!

So you have all the information you want to share with your board thanks to your technology. Now, how do you put it in a presentable format that board members can easily digest? You can create a compelling design by doing the following:

• Make it scannable with headings and subheadings.
• Keep the text short and use clear, concise language.
• Devote space to compelling visual elements like infographics.
• Emphasize key metrics and points with different formatting such as bolding, quotes, and colored text boxes.

Today’s tools make it fun and actually enjoyable to put data together. Leverage tools like Yearly to create well-designed and engaging reports that your board will love to read (and won’t abandon halfway through).

Bear in mind that the order of information in your report also matters. Make sure your board report is appealing to look at and is ordered logically. Here’s a quick outline to follow:

1. A quick overview: Include big-picture highlights to help make sure your board focuses on what really matters when reading the full report.
2. Financial data: This is where you’ll share information regarding the organization’s financial standing and fundraising efforts. 
3. Marketing insights: Include the promotional data that you decided to share with your board.
4. Industry or sector news: Make board members aware of current and upcoming trends and events that may impact your organization within the next few months. They can keep them in mind when considering the performance metrics you’ve shared.
5. Current challenges: Use this to highlight any problem areas for the organization that you noticed when compiling the report. This will help board members focus on areas in need of attention.
6. Upcoming decisions: Board members should know what decisions they’ll be expected to make within the next few months based on the information in the report. This could include things like setting marketing budgets and developing new programs.

Be sure the particular information you share and the way you’re sharing it equips your board members to make impactful decisions as they set goals and budgets for the upcoming year. The last thing you want is to overwhelm your board members with a poorly crafted report riddled with disorganized data.

How to Present Your Report to The Board

Your report is ready to be shared with the board—great! You should do more than just send it out and expect them to read it. Put time on the agenda for your final board meeting of the year or the first meeting of 2022 to go over the report. 

Here’s how you can maximize every minute spent reviewing your report and drawing conclusions for future decisions:

• Send the board report early. Boardable’s guide to board meeting agendas explains that your board members are busy people and need enough time to review documents ahead of meetings. Annual reports are usually pretty lengthy documents, so be sure to send it out ahead of time. Send it as soon as it’s ready, ideally at least a week in advance. Then at the meeting, you can spend a little less time reviewing and instead hit the highlights before jumping into strategizing.
• Anticipate questions that board members might ask. You have to do your preparation, too! Board members might wonder how certain metrics compare to similar organizations in the space. Check out publicly available data regarding similarly-sized organizations or ones that pursue similar causes ahead of time. They might also wonder what next steps should be taken based on what was shared in the report. Give some forethought into potential next steps to help kickstart the brainstorming process.

Presentation is just as important as the report itself. The last thing you want is to let your board members leave the meeting confused. After all, a board that doesn’t fully understand its organization’s performance cannot be effective in leading it toward a more sustainable future. 

If you find that they need more updates, consider presenting reports to the board more frequently than on an annual basis. Perhaps they’d be much more effective with quarterly reports, so they can stay in the loop on your annual goals and strategies.

Final Thoughts

Annual board reports are vital for helping them make the most impactful decisions for the organization. They help them analyze what your organization is doing well and what needs to be adjusted to fulfill your mission. That’s why it’s so important to get it right. 

Make sure you share the data that matters to them, organize it in a format they can digest, and take the time to make sure they understand it. In no time, you’ll be much more confident that your board has what they need to ensure a sound future for the cause.

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A guest post from Jeb Banner of Boardable.