Consider the costs that go into producing a typical corporate annual report. Photo shoots, creative creative concept development, copywriting, design, layout of the financial section — we haven’t even gotten to the killer cost — printing and mailing hundreds of thousands of copies across the globe.
It all adds up quickly.
So, with stock prices in the tank and shareholders ready to pounce on even the appearance of waste, I wonder how many companies will consider doing their stockholders a favor and simply publish the annual report online?
I don’t mean simply posting a PDF of the report. Many companies do that, but the results are not terribly user-friendly for shareholders.
Rather, the ideal online annual is a small site within your Web site that tells the story of the previous year in text, images, video, animation, interactive, etc.
Besides the obvious savings on paper, printing and postage, putting the annual report online offers some serious advantages.
- Everything is measurable – Who reads your annual report? With paper, you may never know. With an online report, however, every visit, link and click can be measured, analyzed and used to make a better, more cost-effective report next year.
- Video is stickier than text - Got stories to tell about last year’s business? Film it and show it. Is your CEO letter tearfully boring? Get creative and film the CEO in an unusual surrounding: at the stores, in the field or in the factory. Would you rather watch two minutes of that or read a page of 10-point sans-serif?
- Take the shareholders’ pulse - You can build polling and surveys into your online annual report in order to gather valuable information from your investors.
- Boost your search engine ranking – What do you think will assist your SEO efforts more: a PDF of your printed annual hosted by an investor relations service…or the same content, in highly searchable HTML, hosted at your own domain?
- Make the data downloadable – Some investors like to crunch the numbers. Why not make your data available for download in a CSV file?
- Create sharable content – You can set up your online annual report so that many of its components (slideshows, videos, commercials, audio, images, etc.) can be redistributed easily by others (bloggers, reporters, fans, etc.), thus increasing your audience beyond investors and helping to spread your story. In a good year, you’ll add to the number of people who have heard about your success. In a down year, you’ll add to the number of people who have heard about your plans for improvement.
Of course, for compliance reasons, you may need to provide your annual report in printed form, or at least to those who request it. To that end, you can print a small quantity of bare-bones reports (mostly numbers, no fluff) and/or make a pared-down report available for download.
Examples of online annual reports
In case you haven’t seen any online annual reports, check out the ones below:
- Coca-Cola Company (This is the 2006 report. I see that they went to a menu of PDFs for 2007. Wonder why?)
- Sutter Health
- Constellation Energy
- Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (This report combines online multimedia with downloadable PDFs of the print version, a nice compromise.)
- MeritCare Cancer Committee – (Full disclosure: MeritCare is a Polymer Studios client.)
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