Now that you have the first 3 Essential Elements of Annual Reports: The Audience, The Story, and The Mission, you’re ready to start your graphic design journey.
Free and inexpensive graphic design tools are available almost everywhere you look these days. The best part about these tools is the suite of templates that come included. Guaranteed, there will be a template you can use for your annual report if contracting a professional designer isn’t in the cards for your organization.
Let’s learn more about the design for your report.
Essential Element 4: Prioritize a Clean Design with Visual Storytelling
The Mistake: Designing text-heavy pages with small fonts, minimal margins and white space, and few visual elements. Effectively producing a document that appears to take hours to read.
The Solution: Use modern design principles and best practices that prioritize visual storytelling and communication, generous spacing, and authentic photography that showcases your work in action.
Design Principles that Work
- Photography before Text: Use professional photos of your organization in action. Include snapshots of actual clients, staff, or volunteers (with proper permissions). These visuals should occupy 40 to 50% of your report’s real estate.
- White Space is a Good Thing: Empty space isn’t wasted space. It’s a strong design tool that improves readability and draws attention to the most important elements. If you’re tempted to fill every inch of every page with something…take a breath, and don’t.
- Limited Text Blocks: Keep written sections between 75-120 words maximum. Break longer concepts or paragraphs into multiple shorter sections with clear subheadings. Bulleted lists should be used sparingly and only for content in a true list format.
- Pull Quotes for Impact: Extract and bring more attention to powerful quotes or statements from clients, donors, staff, or board members and feature them as larger-text design elements. These will stand out, giving your readers (and skimmers) a reason to stop in between denser content.
- Infographics and Data Visualization: Transform statistics into visual stories with elements such as icons, progress bars or thermometers, comparison charts, geographic or heat maps, and timeline graphics. (Your brand style guide may already have these elements handy.)
- Color Strategy: Use your brand colors consistently, but don’t overdo it. Keep it at 2-3 of the primary colors plus neutral black, white, and grays to create clean designs and eliminate visual chaos.
- Typography Hierarchy: Establish clear visual hierarchy through font sizes and weights (bold, regular, italic).
- Main headers: Large and bold
- Section headers: Medium and bold
- Body text: Standard, readable, 11pt minimum
- Captions: Smaller, still legible, italicized
Budget-Friendly Design Tips
- Use free templates from Canva or Adobe Express for layout ideas and starting points.
- If you have a smartphone with a good camera, use it.
- Contract local graphic design students or freelancers for professional assistance.
- Focus the report’s production budget on fewer pages with stronger design over pages with lengthy, text-heavy paragraphs.
Need more? Here are 5 Ways to Use Infographics to Maximize Impact and 3 Tools to Develop Meaningful Infographics.
Up Next in the Series: Essential Element 5 of Annual Reports
Planning the Distribution Strategy from Day 1
What’s the point of creating a stellar annual report if you don’t share it with anyone? Planning a comprehensive marketing and communication plan for your annual report campaign can seem daunting at first – especially if you haven’t created one in the past.
The good news is that once you create the base plan, every year following can use that plan as a template with modifications according to your goals.
Read Essential Element 5 of Annual Reports: The Distribution now.
Additional Resources
Listen to the Full Episode
In Episode 25 of the W(h)ine About Data Podcast, our Communication Manager, Morgan Ellis, sits down with our President, Amanda Lopez, to discuss practical strategies for creating annual reports that stakeholders actually want to read and share with their networks. Whether you’re producing your first annual report or refining an established process, this guide breaks down the 5 essential elements every nonprofit annual report needs.
Listen to the full conversation, or continue reading the blog series for key takeaways and actionable tips you can implement immediately.
Related Blog Posts
- Annual Report Challenges: Why Nonprofits Struggle
- Element 1 of Annual Reports: The Audience
- Element 2 of Annual Reports: The Story
- Element 3 of Annual Reports: The Mission
- Element 5 of Annual Reports: The Distribution
- 5 Ways to Use Infographics to Maximize Impact
- 3 Tools to Develop Meaningful Infographics
- Best Practices for Visualizing Data
- 4 Strategies for an Effective Annual Report
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