Transcripts are autogenerated:
Amy: as I was collecting all these stories and realizing how much we were doing and how we should be letting people know the success and the numbers and the growth of the organization
Patrick Villemaire: So basically from a young age, you’re really kind of unknowingly, I guess at the time when you’re seven, maybe hey, I’m going to be the marketing comms manager
Amy:If there’s so many pain points with producing our print publication and I think mainly my issue was making sure everything fit onto a page and we were getting all these stories that we had to squish together
Patrick Villemaire: welcome to my new video series is called how to avoid the annual crisis and the annual crisis. Of course is the ongoing Amy report Saga that happens every year with nonprofits. So I have Amy here from 4-H Canada. And yeah, thanks for joining me. And basically I’m just want to have a little conversation about annual reports marketing Communications and kind of see where we’re things go. So to start maybe you can tell everyone about who you are your role and kind of what is the short story of Amy
Amy: Yeah, I am a Communications manager for 4-H Canada which right now entails covering off our marketing as well as our internal and external Communications with their audiences. 4-H. Canada is one of the nation’s largest youth organizations focused on positive Youth Development. So we work with a lot of volunteer leaders and youth members and clubs. So I get to tell a lot of stories and get a lot of statistics about our clubs and stuff across the country and work with that to build storytelling and that’s kind of what my focus on is in my role right now.
Patrick Villemaire: And how did you get to 4-H like when did you get into the nonprofit and marketing column space? And how is your journey been so far?
Amy: Yeah, I’ve actually been involved with nonprofits since I was about seven years old. I was working with the Starkey hearing Foundation. I was basically given hearing aids. I was reporting back to them on how it worked in classroom settings really sparked a passion for me for giving back volunteering because I was impacted by that foundation and I know how important nonprofits are because obviously I have my own experience with them.
Amy: went to University volunteered within my Student Association and then kind of steered the path a little bit went into government wasn’t feeling as fulfilled there and landed a role 4-H through staffing agency. Luckily, which kind of brought me back to my nonprofit routes and been here for over a year and a half and I’ve did my undergrad in with a Bachelor of Arts and communication minor in management. and a lot of courses on marketing and social media and obviously growing up at a digital age have my own experiences with that as well.
Patrick Villemaire: So basically from a young age, you’re really kind of unknowingly, I guess at the time when you’re seven, maybe hey, I’m going to be the marketing comms manager, at I don’t know profit, but no, that’s cool that kind of the way that your always kind of LED you on that direction which is pretty cool. So when it comes to annual reports and kind of like, what is your role?
Amy: So right now I’m fully spearheading our annual report project last year. I got the pleasure of working on it. I was my first time working with it annual report. Honestly had no idea what his purpose had never read one before and I get to work with our provinces click that statistics but those stories together gather all the pictures last year’s responsible for working with our designers and print teams and basically getting this publication out and this year. It’s so my baby again, and I’m excited to try something new with it.
Patrick Villemaire: So when you first looked at the annual report for the first time, what was your thought I remember when I started first thinking about any reports and seeing them, years ago was my God, they suck. It’s super boring…
Amy: Yeah. I didn’t think anybody was going to read them.
Patrick Villemaire: who cares but what was your initial thought?
Amy: I didn’t understand the audience of it. I didn’t realize how many stakeholders had an interest in, seeing what the organization was up to and I didn’t fully understand the information that went into one. So as I was collecting all these stories and realizing how much we were doing and how we should be letting people know the success and the numbers and the growth of the organization. I then learned to appreciate it, but it just felt like a very
Amy: boring redundant inaccessible document that I really questioned the purpose of at the start for sure.
Patrick Villemaire: And so don’t going through that process. do you have a good sense of who’s viewing it why they’re viewing it because cuz obviously, the cool thing with annual reports and in the challenge too, I guess is there’s so many people that are looking at it for different reasons that from my experience, going to tell the message and tell the stories trying to engage so many different audiences, a document especially when it’s a PDF, it’s very challenging.
Amy: Yeah, so when I didn’t realize how many people really were involved and were looking to receive the annual report. we have so many partners that our organization relies on and their support for specific programming. Of course, they’re going to want to know the success of that, we have our board and Foundation members. We have our paid membership for have voting stake in the organization, staff members and it’s really key tool for engaging interested partners and sponsors and even just public audiences that are looking to get their kid involved in an organization, but want to know more about how that’s being done the numbers, making sure it’s legit.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, no that makes sense. And when it comes like you said you have design you have to print so what is that I see roll your eyes. It says it sounds like not only a lot right…
Amy: Yeah.
Patrick Villemaire: but a lot to coronate with, doing design doing the print, I was in then obviously, I guess one of the downsides of being a print document is what happens to make a table, …
Amy: exact
Patrick Villemaire: how did you go read it and then there’s a really big title that no one saw in the print goes out, like I can imagine,…
Amy: yes.
Patrick Villemaire: if I imagine you feel a lot of pressure probably from all the different areas of the creation.
Amy: If there’s so many pain points with producing our print publication and I think mainly my issue was making sure everything fit onto a page and we were getting all these stories that we had to squish together and it just was so text Heavy that it wasn’t an easy document to follow. It was not an easy document to review and have Design Elements Incorporated and that without removing some of that crucial content and the accessibility thing was a huge part of it. Of course, you can have an accessible PDF but that is a very costly Endeavor and it is also very time-consuming. You have to take into consideration the color Hues this text size for making sure the screen reader can read at all text and
Amy: While that’s much easier to do on a website because there’s a lot more of integrated modules to prompt you to do that. It’s making sure that everything has those aspects during that review process. So really was timely and at the end of the day, it should not have been so complicated and should not have taken so many. Months to just get it ready for print.
Patrick Villemaire: And so I mean obviously you’re going digital this year. How much time do you think that’s going to save?
Amy: Yeah.
Patrick Villemaire: Do you have any estimates and have you been tracking do you have a sense of how long it took last year to be able to do that comparison?
Amy: Yeah last year, I’d say it took about three to four months to put together, but only really a month and a half of that maybe maximum was gathering and writing of that content. I’m hoping to save at least a month this year. I think without those rounds of revision For the design and print aspect in making sure that between the folds of a paper that text is gonna appear It’s Gonna Save Us a lot of big headache I think. in that review process and then again, you don’t have to review the printed documents so that Saves a few weeks there. Mail outs unnecessary and it’s just super easy to post that Share that on social the engagement is much higher online anyway, so I’m really looking forward to it.
Patrick Villemaire: So in terms of Engagement, when you look at your background in terms of comms and marketing and social what is the secret sauce for promoting, not just this but anything in general do you have kind of the Amy Playbook of how to publish and promote.
Amy: I think specifically for nonprofit or any organization that works with people is avoiding stock photos. Primarily. I’m showing the faces of the real people involved in the organization creates way bigger engagement. If you think about you see a Facebook post you see someone you recognize you take them their family members sees that that person was tagged and then it’s just the cycle of reaching a larger audience with bigger views. anything
Amy: Video content wise seems to be gathering people’s attention much quicker normally people are more likely to scroll past a photo nowadays, with tiktok reels the increase in popularity there people are looking for that engaging moving content. And that’s also super exciting about an online annual report is the ability to we’ve done some pretty phenomenal campaigns over the past year that are videos that are on YouTube. So to be able to integrate that within a virtual annual report, I think would be significantly more engaging in also attract those visual people who might not be interested in Reading as much as they are watching.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, I know that that makes sense. what do you have found is the biggest challenge? Is it trying to squish everything in the past? the only when you’re looking at print straining a squish it on to page layouts that make sense. what’s your biggest challenge? Is it like getting the data in the stories or
Amy: yeah, I think you definitely is condensing the content without taking out, those critical important highlights and content that submitted for an annual report is 95% of the time important statistics and storytelling that you really want to include and you don’t want to have to cut out much of that and with the design process. the text size obviously needs to be large enough for people to read. So if it doesn’t fit on a two-page spread. Cuts are going to need to be made and it was also very difficult with the text documents to engaging graphic elements to have those colors and those shapes and icons put throughout the text takes away from that text space. So obviously, having to prioritize
Amy: the paragraphs over the visual element was tough a tough call because I’m looking at it. I’m going I don’t really want to read all this. There’s no breaks throughout it. It’s overwhelming. So that was a difficult compromise and probably the biggest pain point of a print annual report.
Patrick Villemaire: That makes sense. And How do you decide what goes and what goes It goes that doesn’t make the cut.
Amy: I’m usually like the extra sentences that might be reiterating something at the start of a story. it’s a very tedious process of going through and finding those unnecessary words seeing if you can, Find synonyms, and it’s a whole other comps process to put that together. Yeah.
Patrick Villemaire: Indeed do you have a method for saying how many words are needed or when you’re sending information to the programs you say we need four stats on this or do you just say give me everything and I’ll take care of it.
Amy: It’s pretty much give me what you have and we’ll take care of it. Our statistics are obviously used for many different things apart from the annual report. So we basically try to gather as much as we can and our provincial organizations are crucial for the running this organization. We were nothing without them. So what they’re excited to share is really disheartening to need to remove a paragraph or two that someone put their time and effort in putting together for you, and it was tough call because there was no Text limit per page. It really depended on what they were submitting how many photos they were submitting with it, and we wanted to prioritize obviously the photo implementation as well. So it was trying to find that balance, but no we didn’t request any. specific limit and now that you mentioned it probably would have been smarter to do it that way but
Amy: We really just wanted to get as much content as we could out of fear of there not being enough for some reason.
Patrick Villemaire: Time, yeah. Right, right, and I guess the nice thing going digital is you can have read more that goes to an article or expands, the content. So you’re less stock where someone sends you five pages of text and…
Amy: Yes.
Patrick Villemaire: you go into two and you can say, we’ll put the other three pages, on another page and someone wants to know more they can go over there or maybe that already exists, right? You’re looking to articles and that thing.
Amy: and it’s a challenging balance there for sure.
Patrick Villemaire: And what about What role does the CEO kind of come to you with a mandate or is it basically you run with it? And then it kind of goes up and then you get the changes in feedback.
Amy: Yeah, so in our instance for our organization the CEO will write that introductory letter. They play huge role in picking a theme for the annual report and they play critical role in that review process making sure that the message that they want to convey. Is there a lot of the lifting comes from the marketing and Communications teams and the CEO will make the time to review it because they will obviously have to present that to their own Partnerships and stakeholders. So yeah, it’s important to them as well.
Patrick Villemaire: And when it comes to CEO what’s the most important thing that they’re looking for?
Amy: That’s a good question. I wish I knew I’m not a CEO. my understand not yet.
Patrick Villemaire: Not yet.
Amy: I don’t know.
Amy: I think from my understanding it’s a clear concise and positive representation of the organization that they’re running. and I think it’s very meaningful for them to recap a year while they were in that position of CEO as this is what we’ve accomplished during my time here and this is what we hope to accomplish in the future. So I think it’s a bit of a personal summary for them as well.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, I’d imagine that they probably feel a lot of pressure when they’re presentation to the stakeholders into the board saying hey, I’m doing good work here and there’s a plan we got to I’d imagine that that’s probably the most stressful thing for them. just and the nice thing with having the marketing comes team is you can use the stories and numbers in the stats in the presentation to kind of tell that story right because we all know storytelling is much more effective than just, giving facts
Amy: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I can’t speak too much on that experience. But that is what I assume is. Yeah this case.
Patrick Villemaire: Yeah, so we have kind of a tradition and I say it’s a tradition because I did it once and I’m going to do it again. So I think thereby it becomes a tradition. So I like what I like to do is I like to go chat GPT kind of give us some prompts and then come back with a question for you and…
Amy: Okay.
Patrick Villemaire: EBT. Give me about 100 questions to choose from. And …
Patrick Villemaire: how to add GPT is, all hail the overlord. So the question that we have from Chad GPT is how have recent trans and digital marketing marketing influenced the content of your inner reports.
Amy: Wow, that’s a great question. Since we’re only just getting started this year. I think I’m going to speak on that experience.
Amy: As an organization this year. We really focused on video content. It’s made our sponsors and partners very happy. It’s gotten a lot of engagement on our platforms. So I think that really influenced our decision to go digital this year because that content was so successful and we do want to include that in. The digital annual reports as for the content itself. once again those photos 4-hers are real leaders. faces of the organization have the best engagement on our platforms. So to kind of merge those two together knowing that this is what people want to see hopefully that will bring them into the annual report and keep them engaged as they grow through it.
Patrick Villemaire: No, And one last question that I have is what’s going to make this year success for you? Again, yeah,…
Amy: with the annual reporter in general
Patrick Villemaire: I mean in general but particularly towards the report.
Amy: what is gonna make this year success? I’m really excited about the ease of the rollout of this annual report. It is quite literally a link that is so much easier to share on social media to incorporate into our website to have people to have in one place. So when anybody wants to refer back to it, it’s there they know where to look for it. It’s not a print document that they need to have on hand and what we did have PDFs it still wasn’t as easy to open and scroll through your phone because the pages would be separated. So I think the huge success this year’s hopefully more readers more engagement more sharing and I hope our partners and sponsors like it.
Patrick Villemaire: Amazing and I guess the nice thing with going digital is you can track you’ll be able to come back with metrics of last year.
Patrick Villemaire: So, a year from now last year. This is how we did this is what the people care about and then going forward, trying to keep doing better and better Awesome. Amy,…
Amy: exactly
Patrick Villemaire: thank you so much. Great having you and I really appreciate your time and look forward to seeing what you come up with.
Amy: Thanks so much for having me. I look forward to working with you.
Patrick Villemaire: Thank you. Okay.