Showcasing your charity’s impact online without it costing the world

Each year, registered charities must publish an annual report and creating a new one from scratch every time can be quite the undertaking: expensive, time-sensitive, all-consuming.

An updated design, new content, getting department input, liaising with printers and searching for that board approval is a lot for a team – or team member – year-in, year-out.

Once it’s finally realised, charities might share it on social media, send out the link in a newsletter, post out some copies and move on. A lot of time and money is not necessarily wasted, but misused.

Increasingly, Impact Reports take the form of a nicely presented PDF document. However, PDF’s are historically not very accessible (unless pre-planning took place), difficult to read on desktop, let alone on mobile and can be large in file-size which can be off-putting for many.

Add in to that that Adobe Acrobat (the programme to read and view PDFs) isn’t natively installed on computers and we’re starting to see a few barriers here to showcasing our impact.

A more time and cost-effective way to provide your impact is by having it as a section on your website.

Accessible, searchable, manageable

Your website is the ‘shop window’ to your great cause. You spend a lot of time trying to get people engaged with the work you do via your marketing and communications. If your call-to-action directs users to your website, why would you send them elsewhere?

It stands to reason that the thing we’re the most proud of – our impact – should be a clear and fundamental section of our charity website, not a separate document.

For anyone who has managed a website’s content, editing copy and updating pages is a core function of most content management systems such as WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Drupal or Statamic. But when thinking about managing the content of annual impact that function goes out of the window and back into Microsoft Word, InDesign and Canva.

How much time could your organisation save by anually updating an impact page on your website to highlight your impact instead?

Meet people where they are

Charities typically opt for publishing a PDF rather than meeting audiences where they are – online. You can share the link as you normally would, but with a digital report you can also benefit from additional traffic. Users who wouldn’t typically receive a copy or link to your report may navigate to it organically. 

One major advantage of centralising the report on your site is that you can give clear, real world examples to demonstrate your impact. Hosting a separate document can mean relying on screenshots for context, versus embedding links for further reading elsewhere on your website. Easily link to case studies, client testimonials and creative assets without losing your audience.

It’s also simpler to adapt for both desktop and mobile when you create your report directly within a digital platform (rather than designing it in a fixed format like PDF).

Benefits of digital reporting

As charities strive to rank in search and drive web traffic, choosing a PDF report is a real missed opportunity. Having all this information on your site will provide Google with valuable information about your organisation, can help you rank for highly relevant keywords and will increase possibilities for including both internal and external links. 

A fixed format – like a PDF – is also impossible to amend. Once someone has downloaded your Impact Report you can’t update the version they have, even if it includes wrong data or typos. By hosting a digital version of your report you can easily tweak to update mistakes after publishing.

Publishing your Impact Report as a page on your website can also help strengthen your branding. A good charity website has a strong visual identity, and using your website templates allows uniformity and consistency.

It’s a great opportunity to use interactive elements too. Add points of interest throughout your report to encourage engagement from users. Data doesn’t have to be dull, and hosting your report on your site can give these insights a modern and fresh look. 

On Few and Far’s own Impact Report web page we opted for an interactive table of contents presented as eye-catching chapters. This not only looks great but also breaks up the content for users to interact with by area of interest or priority. 

Get valuable audience insights

Publishing your impact report online also has the added benefit of seeing how your audience engages with the data. You can view traffic sources to see if they visited from your organic social shares, newsletter or organic search results. Accessing insights like the average length of time users stayed on the page or which features earned a click can help you refine your impact report and optimise for next year. 

Include buttons throughout the report for further reading and CTAs. Tracking clicks on these buttons will demonstrate which areas are of most interest to readers. You can use these insights to write related blog posts that explore areas of interest in more detail. 

Thinking about making your impact more accessible?

At Few and Far, we help charities bring their impact reports to life online with bespoke digital storytelling and design. If you’re curious about what that could look like for your organisation we’re always happy to chat.