How to Craft an Annual Report: HRDC
HRDC is a critical nonprofit that improves lives across Southwest Montana. While they are known for their warming shelters and food banks, the organization wanted to share a lesser-known part of their mission for their 2024 annual report: their community development work. My job was to write that story, and serve as the art director for the report’s visual design.
It was a collaborative effort with the many experts at HRDC. Here’s how we did it.
How do you write an annual report that is inviting to readers?
Understand the difference between story and information.
While working with the experts of HRDC’s community development work, I was immediately struck by their deep knowledge and nuanced understanding of this region’s housing needs. Years of data, policy, and strategy inform all of their decision-making. It was clear that crafting a single-page report of every aspect of their work would be impossible. Instead, I looked for a narrative — one that leveraged the facts that best communicated their organization’s vision.
Using staff interviews, organizational documents, and online resources, I wrote a draft of their annual report. Three rounds of feedback and revisions later, we had a refined story of HRDC’s community development work.
How do you make an annual report visually engaging and clear?
Try, then try again.
As the project’s art director, I worked closely with HRDC’s communications team, in particular their in-house graphic designer. The two of us met often. In our first meeting, we went over HRDC’s brand, the previous year’s annual report, and ideas for this new one. In every meeting after that, we leaned into the design: looking at drafts, identifying what was working and what needed reimagining, and laying out expectations for revisions.
We anchored the design around a key concept: the housing ladder. Using this design element, we could arrange the report’s data in a context that was easy to understand at a glance.
Organizing the nearly 1,000 words of text was its own challenge. This was a folded brochure, as well, which required that we consider the folds in our text layout. After many iterations, we found a solution that was both legible and interesting.
Openness is crucial in a collaboration like this is one. The designer was open to feedback, and I was, too: sometimes my ideas simply didn’t work, and we needed to try something else. Designing often requires experimentation, and we were not afraid to throw pixels at the screen to see what stuck.
The result? An annual report worth reading.
