Digital annual reports are an excellent way to present your annual report in a compelling and interesting way, engaging audiences and turning what’s traditionally an uneventful piece of regulatory collateral into a fantastic piece of storytelling.
Every year, we write a review of the simplest online annual reports ( FYI we concentrate on designing digital annual reports). This year, we’d wish to highlight five annual reports that we expect really stand out.
Novozymes
Novozymes is an agri-research company focused on using enzymes and microbes to form agriculture better for farmers, consumers, and therefore the planet. Their annual report is, for the way, a testament to simplicity. tons of the reports we’ll check out representing significant investments of your time and energy and may be quick to dismiss as “well, yeah, that’s Google.”
But Novozymes shows that some nice graphs and a touch of parallax scrolling go along thanks to telling a story with numbers. We also loved their simple navigation and the way easy it had been to access more information on complex topics.
Roche
Roche’s annual report is nothing short of visually stunning.
Of all the reports we checked out , Roche, a Swiss-based pharma and diagnostics healthcare company, is the one that went video-first the foremost .
Every section features a shocking video, united thematically with an easy overlay. The results are a report where you recognize you’re moving to a subsequent chapter, but you furthermore may know you’re within the same book. It’s a fragile balancing act, especially with media as rich as video, and Roche manages it admirably.
Their sub-stories where you’ll dive into more detail continue the superb interactivity. The sole critique is that the navigation is tied to most sites, making it difficult to actually bounce round the report and find specifically what you’re trying to find . beat all though, great use of a difficult medium.
- Girls Who Code
Unsurprisingly, Girls Who Code, a nonprofit dedicated to getting more women involved in coding, had a shocking digital annual report. There’s tons to like here but we wanted to call out a couple of key features.
First, it’s branded. It seems like Girls Who Code, but if you reminisce about past annual reports, all of them have an identical look and feel, updated to reflect the age they were produced in. an equivalent way other organizations brand their knowledge centres or customer portals, Girls Who Code did that to their annual reports.
And this is often a stroke of genius. Not only does it mean that there’s a cohesion here that’s missing from many other reports — a cohesion which will build brand / investor value over time — but there’s also a way of continuity and deliberateness. It’s not just nice looking: it’s not trying to find a reason.
We also loved:
- The use of gifs and interactive media during a playful, almost “this is an afterthought” way
- Interactive graphs
- Beautiful data visualizations
- Simple navigation
- Clever typography
All in all, Girls Who Code did a fantastic job on their online annual report.
- WNET
Most annual reports are built of an equivalent stuff: an intro, letter from the CEO, product/department/initiative, deep dives, stats, and financials.
WNET, a nonprofit that runs a couple of PBS stations, took a special approach. instead of showing the output of what they created, they only showcased the creation themselves.
Their “year in review” is an amalgamation of all the various sorts of media and content they produced over the year, highlighting big wins and creating an experience that’s more ‘slice of WNET’ than ‘annual report. The results are a digital experience that you simply can’t wait to explore and may spend hours running down rabbit holes in.
- Vodafone
Vodafone took a year faraway from our top annual reports last year, but they’re back in 2019 with a vengeance. For an entire and total on-brand experience, Vodafone is tough to seem past.
Simple to follow, slick transitions, and photography that exactly mirrors their look and feel elsewhere, Vodafone leveraged what companies tend to ditch . Yes, you’ll use your annual report back to brand out from your core brand – but there’s tons of useful information to keep it consistent.
Final Thoughts
Organizations should see the annual report not as an admin task, but as an exquisite opportunity to inform your brand story, with whatever tools you would like to inform it. For some, that’s an easy PDF. except for most, there’s huge potential to include intricate web design into the project.
Every year, this post gets harder to write down as more and more organizations push their annual reports into interactive content experiences.
We can’t wait to ascertain what stories hit the wires next year, and the way those stories are told.
