Annual reports are a mandatory undertaking for publicly traded companies, but they are also a great opportunity (when done correctly) to connect with investors. Click here to learn more.
Annual reports are both an important and essential way for any publicly traded firm to communicate with investors and meet the needs of regulators.
But annual reports are also labor-intensive undertakings. It can be a struggle for businesses to convey their key messages prominently amid the financial data that they need to report. But with a bit of resourcefulness and strategic thinking, enterprises can find creative ways to amplify their most important content from their annual reports. One example: the publication of the annual report summary.
An annual report summary is what it sounds like: a summation of the key data in an annual report outside the confines of the report itself. Done right, an annual report summary also attracts an audience to the annual report itself by sharing key insights that invite further exploration.
What should be in your digital annual report summary?
Based on our experience working with several clients on annual reports and summaries, we advise most companies to provide the digital report content as a summary of the year — a year in review — taking elements of the front section of the report and giving an overview to visitors.
Here's what an effective Year in Review should have:
- Headline sections from the full annual report. Your Year in Review should be like a shop window of highlights into the full annual report.
- An (easily) updatable site framework. Pick a framework that works year after year and that can be easily updated when needed.
- A Chairman’s statement and strategy content. Showcase your company’s leadership and goals with compelling multimedia.
For example, we worked with our client Pearson to publish a digital summary of its 2021 annual report.
The summary highlights some core themes of the company’s annual report via several web pages.
Readers can click on the pages for more insight.
Because those themes are central to Pearson’s narrative, the pages have persisted long after the publication of the report without requiring updates.
What’s the scope of these summaries?
- Most summaries are one page. But one-pagers can still be long, so in-page navigation is typically added.
- Others create a section with separate pages. See the Pearson example (above) for this style.
- Multimedia will also affect your scope. The number of illustrations, charts or custom-made videos that need to be created – or other functionality such as interactive maps or report building – which enables the visitor to create a bespoke version of the Annual Report and download it will determine the complete scope of your project.
Where should your annual report summary be published?
We recommend that the annual report summary content is integrated into the Investor Relations section on your corporate website and not created as a microsite.
The reasons for this include:
- Maximizing the longevity of your site traffic. Microsites of Annual Report content attract large spikes of visitors around the launch of the Report, just after Results Day. However, this quickly tails off leaving few or no visitors after that. If the content is part of the main site – the number of visitors remains constantly much higher.
- Search engines will have assigned authority to your site and its domain. Creating a new site with a new domain will lead to reduced search engine traffic as the new address or domain will have less authority. The bottom line is that results from this new domain will always appear lower on the search results pages – than results from the main corporate domain
- A new version of the same digital summary can be created every year. And each previous year be moved into an archive. This is something that visitors and search engines alike will find easy to access.
We’ve used this approach with numerous clients, including Anglo American.
What kind of features and functionality should your summary include?
Annual report summaries can be as sophisticated as you would like them to be. That said, we recommend treating them seriously as an essential expression of your brand. The summary creates an all-important first impression. This means planning them seriously with an appropriate scope.
Following are some variables that affect scope (beyond the normal costs of designing and building the summary):
- Illustrations, infographics – animated or static.
- Advanced KPI illustrations and/or animation (see this example from BT in their Annual Review).
- Interactive operations or project maps – see SNC Lavalin example (very simple version).
- Video editing and production – this would normally be done at the time of the Annual Report design and production
Contact IDX
We have extensive experience of working closely with Annual Report design and print agencies as part of our investor relations work. Contact us to learn more.
