How to Use Issuu to Create an Annual or Quarterly Report for Your Nonprofit

From concept to implementation, your reports are an important visibility tool for donors. This is often the best way for people to see where funds go and ultimately learn more about how your nonprofit works. You put a lot of time and effort into making sure every bit of criteria is met in your reporting, but displaying that information can create a bottleneck. Here are some ideas to help you use Issuu to optimize and house your annual or quarterly reports.

Prioritize Key Details

Unsurprisingly, nonprofits know the importance of sharing their success stories. When readers just see the numbers, it can be easy to move on, but a report that goes into a bit of detail about how you’re impacting lives will make all the difference. Remember that this report might be the first one someone reads from your organization, so each one should keep the mission top of mind and share outcomes that make it easy to understand what your organization has done lately. 

Start with the mission statement and then go into significant accomplishments from the last year. Go into the financial statement next and give it prominent placement in the report (after all, this is why many readers are looking at your report in the first place). Finally, take time to thank your donors, volunteers, and anyone else who’s made major contributions in the last year. 

Issuu makes structuring your report easy. With integrated links and QR codes, you can create an interactive table of contents for readers to hop to each section easily. Link to specific website pages to save space in your report while allowing curious readers to learn more about your various projects. This also creates an opportunity to link to your leadership team and volunteers' public profiles like LinkedIn. Here’s an example from UNICEF’s 2021 Annual Report: 

Use Visuals to Help Readers Stay Engaged

High-quality images are a key component of an attractive report. Even if your organization is operating remotely at the moment, make sure you try to get some good images that you can share in your reports or marketing materials later on. Video content is also at the forefront of digital content. With Issuu, you can add photos, videos, and any other visual content directly to your documents. You have the space for everything you need to tell your brand’s story.

Publish Your Report & Track the Data

Compliance is a foundational aspect of your nonprofit organization, and a significant part of that is visibility. Issuu helps make that easy. Our all-in-one platform makes sharing simple, so your donors can see where their donations have gone and celebrate your organization's successes. Once your reports are published, you can track the data and learn more about who’s seeing your content. Make data-driven decisions by learning about where your readers are based, how long they stay on each page, and the type of engagement they have with your reports. 

By following these simple steps, you can create and share your reports with ease, quarter after quarter or year after year.