When it comes to publishing toolkits, impact reports, policy reports, or an annual report, nonprofits have two options: print/PDF and digital. These publications are staples of nonprofit communications strategy. While an annual report delivers a focused brand narrative and summary of the year that reinforces why an organization’s work matters, for policy advocacy nonprofits and think tanks, or nonprofits engaged in research and the sciences, reports and toolkits represent something far more significant—they are the work. Knowledge mobilization is at the center of delivering research and recommendations in ways that are accessible and actionable for audiences—engaging, educating, and motivating people to inform dialogue, influence policy, and improve entire sectors. And if the medium is indeed the message, then how well research and policy reports engage audiences online will greatly determine how effective they are in advancing thought leadership to make change happen.
The decision of whether or not to create a digital toolkit or digital report is an important one. It’s also a choice that should be easy. Simply put, going digital is all but certain to create more value and deliver better results for nonprofits than publishing static PDFs. Yes, digital represents a bigger investment in time and money than publishing a PDF. And this investment is also likely to generate outsized returns.
Sure, there are reasons that print/PDF reports work for nonprofits. One reason we often hear is that an organization’s audience is older and “just likes print.” Fair enough—and if this is the case for your nonprofit, then either committing fully to print or, even better, designing a print report with a digital complement that will reach a wider audience may make a lot of sense. It’s important, though, to make a distinction between print and PDF. While the trend is towards digital, a professionally printed report can create a great reading experience that you just can’t deliver online. Publishing a PDF and expecting audiences who want a physical copy to print it on their home printer, however, is decidedly not that. And simply posting a PDF policy report and hoping that “downloads equals engagement” is more wishful thinking than true insight of a report’s effectiveness.
Digital reports and toolkits, by contrast, provide a far more sure thing when it comes to delivering content that will connect with audiences and in evaluating the impact of the work that goes into producing them. So, if your nonprofit is evaluating whether to make the shift to digital-first publishing, then what are the benefits of a digital annual report or digital policy report?
The Top Benefits of Publishing Digital Reports for Nonprofits.
Digital annual reports are more accessible. People are online more than ever before and more than half of all web visits happen on mobile devices. Reports are designed to engage, educate, and motivate an audience to act. So, doesn’t it make sense to deliver an annual report or policy report online in a way that they’ll actually enjoy? Reading a PDF on your phone is anything but a good experience. Today, there are endless combinations of device types, screen resolutions, and personal settings that make every person’s online experience a little different.
By creating digital reports with best practices in responsive design, like Constructive did with the Serious Illness Messaging Toolkit and the Dual Language Learner’s Guide, content is going to be delivered in a way that makes it easy to navigate, enjoyable to read, and, as a result, more resonant. Another way that digital-first reports are more accessible and inclusive? They are easier for vision-impaired audiences to use assistive technologies like screen readers with—making publishing digital reports a commitment to these values.
Digital annual reports increase visibility. Digital annual reports aren’t just more accessible to humans, they’re also far more friendly to machines—specifically, search engines. Search engines like Google reward websites created with content that’s easy for them to index, and nonprofit reports are filled with the kind of valuable content that search engines love. HTML web pages are far easier for search engines to index than PDFs, so publishing a digital annual report or a policy report for your nonprofit is going to rank higher in search than posting a PDF. This translates directly to increased engagement and greater impact, delivering greater return on the investment in time and money that it takes nonprofits to produce their reports. Search engines also favor websites with responsive design, adding another boost to a well-designed, mobile-friendly digital report.
A digital report also makes the most of this visibility through search engine optimization, making organic search traffic more targeted and driving audiences to the content that’s relevant to them more quickly. That’s because internet searches that your nonprofit’s report ranks for will link directly to the page with the content a person is interested in—which is extremely helpful in something like a 120-page policy report on climate change! By contrast, when a PDF comes up in a search result, your audience will have to download the report, open it, and search again to find what they want. Even better, by including SEO tools like Yoast into a digital report website, nonprofits can curate what search engines display in their description of any page in their reports and customize page URLs and meta content to rank better for specific terms.
Digital annual reports give you greater insights. If a person downloads a PDF and doesn’t read it, does it have an impact? That’s the hard truth nonprofits that rely on PDF annual reports, policy reports, and impact reports face. While many organizations track report downloads as a measure of effectiveness, they’re really not a reliable indicator of how useful content is to audiences because it’s impossible to know what someone does after they download a PDF. Conversely, digital reports enjoy all of the benefits of website analytics, giving you valuable insights into who your audiences are, how they’re finding you, and what content they’re engaging with. And by knowing more about who your audience is and what’s resonating in the reports that you produce, your nonprofit can measure and optimize to continuously improve, which is particularly valuable to nonprofits that publish in high volumes, such as think tanks and policy advocacy organizations.
Most people who work in communications are familiar with Google Analytics. When it comes to your nonprofit’s reports, it will tell you where people are coming from, how they are finding you, and what pages they’re reading, giving you insights into your audience and into content engagement . Going a bit deeper with UX analytics like our favorite, Crazy Egg, we can gain even deeper insights into where people are focusing their attention on every page within a report and how they’re interacting with it. Taken together, website analytics for digital reports provide nonprofits with invaluable feedback to improve how they mobilize knowledge online through their reports.
Digital reports are more shareable. While there’s nothing stopping someone from sharing PDF report on social media or email, digital reports provide the opportunity to significantly increase visibility of their content. First, sharing functionality can be designed directly into the report, providing calls-to-action that increase the likelihood that someone will share your nonprofit’s report. Second, audiences will have the ability to share any page from a research report, policy report, or annual report—allowing them to curate their message and direct people to the specific content that they believe is valuable to their audience. By contrast, someone sharing a large policy report would have to both make it clear that the link will start a PDF download and also tell their audience what page the useful idea they want to share is on.
Lastly, as mentioned before, by adding software like Yoast to curate the content metadata for your digital report, social media platforms will deliver the exact summary you want for each and every page, allowing you to curate the message that goes out, providing audiences with insight into what each page in your nonprofit’s report has to offer, and increasing the relevance of your report’s content when it shows up in a person’s social media feed.
Digital reports educate audiences more effectively. Nonprofits such as research institutes and policy advocacy organizations that work in spaces requiring specialized knowledge are no strangers to jargon. And while there are often cries to “get rid of the jargon” in nonprofit communications, for many organizations working on complex or technical issues, this just isn’t practical. In fact, eliminating critical terminology is likely to be counter productive if a nonprofit’s mission involves engaging expert audiences who expect a certain level of complexity to view research and recommendations as being credible.
Luckily, with digital reports, nonprofits can communicate effectively with expert and non-expert audiences even more effectively than they can in print or PDF—educating the uninitiated as they read while reassuring experts who demand rigor in their research. Features like an interactive glossary and interactive footnotes makes jargon more accessible to lay audiences and elevates the source material that adds credibility to research—as we did for The Drug Pricing Lab to help them better explain the abuses of government programs and regulations on drug pricing. And with interactive charts, everything from impact statistics in an annual report to quantitative research in a think tank’s policy report make it possible for audiences to look closely at the numbers, adding depth of understanding to the data.
Digital reports are always up-to-date. While many reports are snapshots in time and do not need to be updated, there are nonprofit research and policy reports that can benefit from having current information, especially if that information is about the current state of an issue. Of course, when someone downloads a PDF, the information they have is static. But the content in a digital report can be updated and refreshed, creating an environment for living content and ongoing audience engagement. When a research or policy report is digital, it remains the single source of truth—and that source can be either dynamically or manually updated at any time. That’s not just helpful for keeping information up-to-date, it can be a lifesaver if there’s incorrect information in a nonprofit’s report.
Digital reports are more engaging. Last, but not least, when a nonprofit produces digital reports instead of static PDF reports, there are countless opportunities to make your content more engaging—and as a result, make it more memorable, useful, and impactful. Animations and interaction design techniques, both subtle and profound, can bring a report’s content to life on the screen and direct readers’ attention to what matters most. This can be particularly important for keeping readers engaged in long, single-page digital reports from start to finish, like our team did in St. David’s Foundation’s 2022 Impact Report and in The Legal Aid Society’s Annual Report. Animation can also add an emotional element that deepens audiences’ connection to the content so that it resonates more deeply—and also reinforces the personality of a nonprofit’s brand in the process. So, whether it’s an annual report that’s telling a nonprofit’s story for the year or a research report from a think tank to inform public policy, adding interactive design polish can add depth and richness to the content that goes beyond the words themselves.
Truthfully, there are plenty more benefits to publishing digital reports for your nonprofit. And, taken together, it’s easy to see how, whether it’s an annual report to tell your brand’s story for the year or a policy report providing research and recommendations to drive systemic change, delivering your content in the way it’s intended to be published online delivers greater impact and value for your mission.
