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Jenny: We’ve had a lot of really lovely feedback about the report this year people just commenting on how stunning it is and how engaging they’re finding it.
Patrick: So when it comes to going digital is it the same amount of effort because you’re producing the content and everything with where the bulky effort goes or do you find it less work, same work, more work than going as a PDF?
Patrick Villemaire: Thank you for joining me. So this is my series. It’s called how to avoid the annual crisis in the annual crisis, of course, is creating a new report. So Jenny Wood from Habitat for Humanity. Maybe if you want to give me 30 30-second introductions of who you are and we can kind of just have a nice conversation about any reports marketing storytelling and all that fun stuff.
Jenny: Hi, I’m Jenny Wood with and the senior manager of marketing and digital at Habitat for Humanity, Canada.
Jenny: I’ve been working in charity marketing for close to 10 years now being involved in a lot of different annual reports and every single one of them is a stress every year.
Patrick Villemaire: what causes the stress?
Jenny: It’s a huge amount of work to pull together.
Jenny: What has happened across an entire charity for 12 months?
Patrick Villemaire: obviously habitats obviously, a big charity. I mean getting lots of stats and stories and information. So what goes into producing the report so not even worrying about the design the formatting all the fun stuff. I imagine that it’s a lot of work just when you start thinking about any report, I’m sure you start feeling like a way to stress right because I think there’s just so much to do especially with the organization of your size.
Jenny: Yeah, you have to pull together the highlights of gross every department. So that’s a challenge to curate the most interesting highlights and then obtain all the details about it and then Though we do annual stats around what has happened as well in the last 12 months. So that’s a big job on its own.
Patrick Villemaire: how do you go about curating all the information?
Jenny: That wasn’t me. That was the cons team.
Patrick Villemaire: He let everyone else do the work.
Jenny: I handled ahead of the digital execution
Patrick Villemaire: I imagine it’s a massive undertaking for them. So in terms of what is your role? in the reports
Jenny: so my role was to work with you to bring it to life digitally, to finalize the design sort the layout, and then manage the building execution of it
Patrick Villemaire: So when it comes to getting and producing the content, do you tell the team this is the theme for this year. This is what we’re looking for, or do you just kind of let them pull everything together for you? how does that kind of Direction go to make something that’s cohesive?
Jenny: I’m yes we were. Building a couple of materials in-house that sort of tied to the annual report because when it was going out it was going to be packaged up for different audiences and we already had the concepts built out for those. So we started with your team Patrick providing the original Core Design Concepts that we had going on those but those evolved house and there’s evolved with you as we went and I think they got a lot better as they evolved as well.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, I remember that don’t know we did a hexagon. Are you guys had a hexagon theme going on and I remember when we’re first started looking at okay and then as soon as you start looking at hexagons, you’re driving down the street in a truck has a hexagon on it and the sign has a hexagon and then you’re watching Home Show and we’re choosing hexagon tiles. literally I cannot escape from these hexagons. it was Madness, but by the end absolutely loved it like it I think was fantastic and the use of colors and everything like it all came together. It was quite fun to produce and I know from our side it was obviously a process from starting from the beginning to where we ended up but it was nice because we were very iterative right? we were always trying to keep each other in the loop and when you guys had, kind of New Direction you’re going internally you sent that over and we kind of send over Concepts as soon as we could just to kind of keep dancing the ideas back and forth. It was very very fluid, which was I think pretty cool.
Jenny: Yeah, we had a couple of big pivots part way through so we really appreciated that you were willing to go with the whole hexago there. I’m going to different Direction with hexagons. And by the way, we’re rearranging the whole report.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, I mean the nice thing with doing digital, rather than a PDF is we don’t have to worry about your rearranging everything now all the page layouts break, right? Because you have to be so careful with putting everything onto a page whereas digitally like okay, I take this row and we move it up and move it down. It’s not quite as stressful.
Jenny: No, no, it’s keeping track of it.
Patrick Villemaire: so when you commication when it comes to going digital, what was kind of like the motivation and the kind of the pros and cons are there that the challenges and the advantages of going a digital versus creating a PDF?
Jenny: So then it’s more accessible. Yeah, we had this PDF that was available online. It was clunky. It was awkward it was Not as engaging.
Jenny: Yeah, it’s such a huge amount of work to pull together the report we want to make sure that people are reading it and finding it interesting and accessible as well. So we want a digital obviously one of the downsides of that is it does cost more than just building a PDF but it’s worth it to bring together that work and show it in its best light and we’ve had a lot of really lovely feedback about the report this year people just commenting how stunning and how engaging they’re finding it. So, that’s really nice.
Patrick Villemaire: Everyone that I showed to that they absolutely love it as well. So I’m always showing it off…
Jenny: that’s nice.
Patrick Villemaire: because you put so much work into it and you want to be proud of it and then you just hope that everyone else engages, as well with it. So when it comes to going digital is it the same amount of effort
Patrick Villemaire: because you’re producing the content and everything with where the bulkly effort goes or do you find it was more work than going as a PDF.
Jenny: Probably a sort of similar amount of work. We did all the design in-house for it last year. because all the design and like that my new level of detail wasn’t house that saved a lot of work, but then there was a little bit more work, obviously keeping you in the loop as we pivoted and sort of managing some of the digital elements like the animations and things like that. That wouldn’t have been present when we’re doing the designing now, so probably somewhere around
Patrick Villemaire: I mean the next thing I think is because we did all this work in the year one in year two then, you can start leveraging some of the same, pieces and styles and everyone I think has the expectation of how’s it going to be upload? Because when you go digital people don’t really, how does a PDF become too, digital website, right? And so I think just seeing how everything flows together would probably, add a little bit more clarity for next year.
Jenny: yeah, there was a lot of conversation in-house on how to deal with stories that was definitely a stress point and something that was a struggle to comprehend how to take a story in a PDF to yeah, it’s just gonna be expandable and what gets expanded and how does the expansion work and that one in particular was definitely an in-house support, but I think you guys just pulled it together exactly how I pictured it and it was a very smooth and then everyone went that’s what you meant.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, exactly. When you have the vision you’re trying to explain. you click this thing and it’s gonna show the rest of the story and it’s gonna animate in and sometimes it’s hard for people to visualize. So when it comes to the CEO like how early was a CU involved in the process and did you find that working with the CEO caused the challenge because I know sometimes people say it’s the last second now the CEO wants to add a whole new section to the reporting you’re like, we were going live tomorrow, so, was that process of working with the CEO?
Jenny: Yes, so that did happen. She didn’t add a whole new section, but she decided to copy it at the entire thing two days before we went live but because it was digital. I kind of blocked you guys from being on the other end of that because it was digital and all available on the website. I just said I’ll come through the code after it’s published So you guys made it live and then we shared it I think two or three business days later, which gave me the exact amount of time that it was needed to pop in and change all that card. So when the senior made it that the last minute changes were really easy.
Patrick Villemaire: I guess I kind of takes a little bit of the pressure off too, You don’t worry about. it’s the PDF. We already sent it out. We have to send it a new version. It’s okay. even today if someone knows a typo or something was wrong, you can just go and change it you don’t have to re resend out, here’s the latest version, right?
Jenny: And that has happened. We have had a couple more rounds of changes since we’ve live as people realized. no, we want to change what that’s called and things that they said people just putting small things that they would like different that they’re able to change now. So that’s really good yet because it’s fully accessible on our website and I can’t build something is incredible as this but I definitely can sort of read the code and find in the HTML want to change things. So it’s very accessible anyone who’s not as technical as well.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah. Yeah, you can just which is fun. And so when it comes to the stats analytics, are you monitoring kind of like, how people are getting there how far they’re going what they’re clicking on. What are they doing in the report or are you leveraging analytics or is it more just right now, is here then, before we do the next one. We’ll take a look at the analytics. see how it worked and then how long people are staying on the page and then
Jenny: I had a At a couple weeks ago, so it’s probably not 100% up to date. but I think we’d had about 800 page views and the average read time was
Jenny: But it was substantially up on the other pages.
Patrick Villemaire: right and…
Jenny: It was right then.
Patrick Villemaire: it’s Nice…
Jenny: Our other pages are pretty.
Patrick Villemaire: because we go digital now even Baseline right when it comes to PDF maybe …
Jenny: Ails yeah.
Patrick Villemaire: how many people don’t click on the button to download it, but you didn’t have no idea what happened. So that’s kind of nice when it comes to the goal of the report so obviously there’s so many different audiences. Do you have a particular goal when it comes to engaging stakeholders and your donors and Prospects or they could obviously there’s so much information How are you using it? And what are your goals for brother report?
Jenny: yes, so the report this year was a little bit different to our usual annual reports we decided to split out the storytelling element from the Legal requirement element, so we have required to produce a financial statement every year and that usually goes out around now.
Jenny: But we sort of felt internally that It was too late. It was no one really cared about what happened in 2023 by the time you get to mid-may and so we wanted to get it out in the first quarter. And so we split out the storytelling element the parts that sort of share all the highlights from the last year across all the different departments when it was still relevant for people to be thinking about last year.
Jenny: So we’ve put that out and one of the goals of that is to help us engage our donors. And so we sent this out with a customer report to all of our corporate donors. And that’s one of the key moments that we use to Steward and think and appreciate all of our corporate donors and the feedback from the stewardship team has been strongly that. This is a key reason why the corporates keep coming back here on years that we send them a custom Report with all of this detailed level of Storytelling in it. And then we also Center out to just all of our other donors and you’re giving and
Jenny: Recurring and yes, so that they’re able to see how their money was used wisely to achieve affordable housing.
Patrick Villemaire: Amazing. No that I mean you guys are doing awesome work in the stories are strong and so moving. So I imagine it’s one thing just to show people, you’ this money did, this in terms of statistics, but when you have that human story, right you’re talking about Mavis or Mavis, much more meaning and impact which is really really cool to see
Jenny: Yeah, it did have some incredibly powerful stories featured in the annual report. s
Patrick Villemaire: It was just hilarious that you guys had to two different mavis’s but yeah, where the others.
Jenny: the first ever Mavis is I’ve come across and we have same time.
Patrick Villemaire: but I love whose idea was it to position as a tell it to me. This is because I think that was really cool.
Jenny: That came from the comments, too.
Patrick Villemaire: it was very Well done. made it very interesting. Right because you’re like what was happening with me this and then, there’s two minutes. It was literally the one part of the annual report that I remember vividly was the tale of two minutes.
Jenny: It says I had a Cons an externalist. So she’s good at writing headlines that are eye-catching.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, that helps for And so what was the one thing that was the most fun for you when you were working on the annual report?
Jenny: I was definitely when we saw it live for the first time. We start that we saw the hexagons like anime in and it all came to life. So everyone’s concerns of how it was gonna work. And is it gonna happen? Then it was all just like charity. it looks amazing.
Patrick Villemaire: Is happening. Yeah, it’s here.
Jenny: This is how the animations work. This is how the heck’s going look and yeah, everyone was just bit blown away. So that was fun.
Patrick Villemaire: You guys did a really good job at breaking up like stories stats quotes and then using the hexagons in the different colors, visually, so kind of make it just not seem like one really long document right? It’s more of a journey. I thought was pretty cool.
Jenny: Yes, like I said the content sat with the club’s team, but they definitely wanted to rethink the annual report when they moved digital so it wasn’t just one really long chunk of blurb and…
Jenny: they wanted to break it into just short Snippets that were easily digestible.
Jenny: So they use the digital as an excuse to sort of force them into the shorter digestible easier parts
Patrick Villemaire: So I have a couple one more question for you and when it comes to the next year, what would be one thing that you do differently in terms of process or the output or design?
Jenny: As the French translations earlier, I think probably a good one.Show it to the CEO for that final review a little bit earlier as well. we sent it to her for the final review with the design layout in place just before we were gonna go.Hit live, and there was a lot of changes that came from that.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, yeah a little stressful.
Jenny: Yeah, I think those are the two things we would have done a little bit differently because they caused a little bit of stress right at the last minute.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, I know makes sense.
Patrick Villemaire: So Jenny, I have a little fun thing that I do at the end of every call.
Patrick Villemaire: So I always ask Jack to chat GPT question to ask you so I basically give it a prompt and
Patrick Villemaire: that the question I get back for you is when it comes to creating a digital annual report. What advice would you give to someone like…
Patrick Villemaire: if they were doing it for the first time?
Jenny: interesting and have a good vision of where you want it to go and how you want it to look. Because you can bring that Vision to life. And allow lots of time.
Patrick Villemaire: Probably more time than you expect, right?
Jenny: Yeah. Yeah, I think we sort of started earlier than we’d planned on the digital front,…
but then it took a bit longer than we had planned as well say we don’t really well that we started a bit earlier.
Patrick Villemaire: That’s great and I’d imagine that’d be useful to have samples of different annual reports right to figure out this is the overall style in terms of animations or…
Patrick Villemaire: flow or look and feel navigation. That would be helpful right as a starting point. Awesome. Jenny,
Patrick Villemaire: thank you so much for joining me and it was a pleasure working with you and I look forward to the next one. Jenny: Yeah, 100%
Jenny: you next year.