The Stress of the Nonprofit Annual Report – Yearly

Nonprofit annual report stress is real and can be overwhelming at times. When I created reports at nonprofits, the process took months and for some reason, the story always went like this:

1. “We should do something different.”
2. “Yes!”
3. Four weeks later, “Nah, we don’t have time or budget, maybe next year.”
4. Write content for graphic design layout.
5. Deliver to designer.
6. Give designer 10 rounds of copy edits, blowing past timeline. Great stories, but took too long.
7. Pay too much for printing.
8. Good distribution and solid marketing of reports.

I was always proud when the project was done, as was the entire team. We spent months on content creation and the designers always nailed it with a new look and feel for the cover, it was a job really well done.

But the stress….oh the stress of every item listed above took a lot out of me when I was working at a nonprofit, trying to make an annual report, sometimes an impact report. It had to be a report that the CEO loved, that the board would appreciate and most of all, a report that fundraisers could get excited about distributing to nonprofit partners.

When we started Yearly, we knew we wanted to alleviate the stress that came from spending a lot of back and forth time on annual reports. We strived to make a platform for digital annual reports flexible, so that when nonprofits have copy edits to make, even major edits, it doesn’t cause a graphic designer to re-layout the report and hold-up our timeline. No more page counts to consider and no more re-designs to accommodate one extra paragraph of text.

Most importantly, if you make a mistake, like spelling a donor’s name incorrectly, you can go back and fix it.

That is how we took the very real stress we experienced year over year and lessened it, well, as much as possible. So, the stress is real and we’ve been there, but going digital can help.

Here are a few tips to help you reduce some of that nonprofit annual report building stress:

• Consider a digital annual report to make editing faster
• Share drafts of a digital report as a live url with colleagues, as you design
• Reduce or eliminate printing to save on the time and cost
• Track if your report is getting read: Embed your report in your website, track analytics with Google

You can do all this with Yearly and get excited about your nonprofit’s annual report process, once again.