How to Create an Annual Report for a Nonprofit
While annual reports are not among the financial documents nonprofit institutions are legally required to produce for state and federal governments every year, they can be a valuable part of your organization's communication with potential donors, board members, staff and the public. Annual reports are your opportunity to describe, in your own words, your organization's successes from the past year. They also give you a chance to describe the organization's financial situation and explain anything that might not be evident in the numbers you are required to provide in more formal financial documents.
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Instructions
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Choose a theme. There's no way you can include all your organization's accomplishments from the entire year, and if you tried you might risk putting potential donors to sleep. Instead, focus on specific, related accomplishments, such as your initiative to provide low-income families in your area with energy-efficient heating, your response to a natural disaster or your outreach to employees who lost their jobs when a local business closed.
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Use real stories to illustrate your accomplishments. Your potential donors are much more likely to relate to a few specific, inspiring stories of people you have helped, projects you have built and community connections you have made, as opposed to general descriptions. Try to use one or two compelling anecdotes to illustrate each section of your report.
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Quantify your accomplishments with solid numbers. How much money did you raise to help homeowners displaced by a devastating tornado? How many corporate volunteers did you recruit to tutor local immigrant students? How many parks did you build in inner-city neighborhoods?
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Bring your descriptions to life with photographs and descriptive photo captions. Don't use stock photos, which look generic. Instead, include real photos of your work with a sentence describing why the photograph is important.
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Explain the numbers in your yearly financial report in conversational language. Don't assume your donors and board members read or can understand your accounting documents. Instead, use this as an opportunity to highlight where most of your money comes from and how you spend it.
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Include a list of all your donors from the past year, taking extra pains to spell all their names correctly. Potential donors may be inspired by seeing that other organizations or people they know have already contributed, and those who are on the list will appreciate the acknowledgment and positive marketing.
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Double-check all the phone numbers and contact information for your organization, as well as all the names and numbers you have included in the rest of the report. People who are familiar with your work will notice any errors, and you don't want your organization to appear sloppy.
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References
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